Why Design is Crucial for Early Stage Startups
A design workshop with expert tips from Personal.ai’s Co-Founder and Head of Design Kristie Kaiser at San Diego Startup Month on October 7th, 2021.
In recent years, San Diego has come to be known as the Silicon Valley of Southern California, and for a good reason. Home to over 100 AI unicorns and ranked as the 6th-fastest growing technology market (Source), sunny San Diego has more to offer than just warm weather and Anchorman. It’s also home to limitless talent, high-achieving tech professionals, and diverse community programs — the star of which is Startup San Diego.
The 2nd Annual San Diego Startup Month is happening now through October 29th, featuring some of the city’s best entrepreneurs, leaders, and investors sharing insights, answering questions, and teaching us pearls of wisdom for success in our respective industries.
Creating the UX and UI behind Personal.ai has been a whirlwind of an experience that I was lucky to present to the SD Startup Month audience. Last Thursday, I took the virtual stage to lead a workshop on my process to create the AI extension of your mind that we are building at Personal.ai. I was given the opportunity to break down- designing a category-defining tech product that excites new users and impresses investors. Following the 30 minutes session, participants got the chance to present their own UX and UI design questions for my feedback.
We enjoyed the opportunity to meet so many attendees and present with San Diego’s best so much that we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss out either. Here’s a recap of all the things I covered in the workshop; including examples of the design assets Personal.ai used to raise over $5 million in our Seed round of funding, a designer’s role in the success of a startup, some of the tools I’ve found to be most helpful, and more. Pull out your personal AIs (or notebooks and pens if you’re old school) — you won’t want to miss these tips for design success.
A Design’s Role in Startup Success
Companies are broadening their understanding of design from only focusing on aesthetics — like color, material, typography, and imagery — to include end-to-end user experiences and execution on future strategic business goals.
“Companies that excel at design grow revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers” (McKinsey).
That’s why our CEO and founder insisted on bringing on a designer to the co-founding team. He knew that designing a new product that’s the first of its kind would need someone focused on putting the user first and bringing the company vision to life through design.
If you are a designer- these are reasons not to shy away from early-stage startups. Don’t be afraid to join and make a direct impact.
Our product is the first of its kind. There aren’t a lot of consumer-focused AI products in the market. More AI solutions are B2B. The consumer AI products we are most familiar with are probably Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. Our product is unique because each person has a unique AI model trained off of their own data, essentially creating a Google search engine for their own mind.
Obstacles
We have a bold vision. We see a world where everyone has their own AI and can monetize their own personal knowledge in an AI economy. This vision was intimidating to many investors, and we struggled to communicate this vision with a deck over Zoom (thanks COVID-19).
Yet we saw the most traction with investors when we first started designing the grand vision of our product before we were even ready to start development.
We’d work on developing product requirements based on business goals and user research. Then I’d start working on the design to bring the vision to life. Using Figma, I can create designs rapidly in a layout that’s flexible and easy to update. Those designs then turn into realistic prototypes that feel alive.
This process helped our founding team narrow down our product vision and sell our ideas to investors, clearly communicating UX expectations to developers along the way.
Taking the time to create high-quality prototypes proves to be one of your most valuable efforts in the early stages of your startup.
How to use the prototypes:
The following list of prototypes is excellent for engaging in early user feedback. We will post Figma prototype links in our Discord community and ask for feedback. Our beta users add comments to the prototype and post their initial reactions in the community. It’s a fun and engaging way to build in public, get valuable user insights, increase engagement, and generate excitement for new product features.
Using the same prototype links, I get feedback from internal stakeholders and developers. The prototypes help show our grand vision to the engineers, so they can architect the feature to account for future needs, even if the initial release will be descoped to a basic part of the entire feature.
To finish it off, I use the same prototype links and record my screen using Loom. I embed the Loom links into our pitch deck so investors can watch the UX and instantly understand our grand vision.
With just one pitch meeting, we won an investor using our most simplified deck that showcased simple brand messaging and four Figma prototypes addressing different use-cases our product was solving.
Some hard-earned learnings along the way:
- Rebranding or changing is ok! We started as Luther. Ai, then Human AI, and are now Personal.ai. Shifts happen; keep moving forward. Sometimes strategic changes will play off tenfold in the future.
- Take advice but stay true to your vision. Investors are bound to have opinions on what you’re building and how you should do it. Listen and learn how to improve your pitch, but always stay true to your vision and purpose.
- Do your research and mold your deck to your audience. Designers can mock up the product to be relevant to their audience. You can create unique use cases targeted towards each pitch meeting to help communicate the problem you are solving.
Design Tools for Success:
Figma:
Figma is a vector graphics editor and primarily a web-based prototyping tool.
Pros:
- Collaborative and very user friendly
- Auto layout is magical — I can structure my designs as they would be with CSS making design handoff easy for developers and increasing the quality of my designs. Everything has consistent units of measure, and it is effortless to move around elements and update in a responsive layout.
- Sharing links is efficient for internal and external stakeholders
- Deck design in Figma has been so much easier than Keynote, Powerpoint, or Google slides. Even my co-founders are in Figma creating slides, and we can all work on it together.
We use the prototype link from Figma and set up a website redirect so we can type in personal.ai/[insert-custom-name] making it effortless to share as needed.
Loom
Loom is a video messaging tool that uses instantly shareable videos for communication. With Loom, you can record your camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously. You can check out some of the demo videos we’ve created on our Youtube.
Pros:
- Design handoff to developers
- Product marketing videos for emails and in-product walkthroughs
- Screen recording to demo for investors. We link to these videos in our pitch decks, so the investor still has a co-founder walking them through the product when we send the deck via email.
Chameleon
Eliminating the need to write code, Chameleon lets you build product experiences and manage them for your web application. Using Chameleon, you can show new users key functionality, highlight product changes, improve feature discoverability and reduce confusion and support requests.
Pros:
- Onboarding steps
- Popups
- Tooltips
- Tours
- Surveys
- Help centers
Anyone on your team can easily create all of the mentioned experiences (it doesn’t have to be a designer). We use this as an essential part of our product’s user experience. I can create experiences and make changes without involving our development team, allowing for a very flexible and iterative design process. Built-in metrics and integrations with Hubspot then help us target specific cohorts of users.
Webflow
A no-code website tool enabling designers to create powerful and dynamic websites. As a designer, I love this tool. I have all the control over the look and feel of our website.
Pro:
- Easy to update — we’ve pivoted the messaging and design of our website to target investors as our strategies changed in the early stages.
- The website builder is similar to a design tool like Figma, making the experience very user-friendly for designers.
- There are lots of beautiful pre-made templates that can be easily branded and customized.
Where to look for a designer?
- San Diego Startup- Connect with others in this community and join Slack’s San Diego Startup Workspace. You can find community organizations in your region too!
- Existing talent- Talk to designers you’ve worked with before or request referrals (even if they can’t be all in, they may know someone who would be).
- Don’t overlook the jack of all trades- Talented designers don’t always have to come from your niche industry. Often it can be better to be a generalist to appeal to a larger audience rather than searching for a specialist in one area of design.
About Kristie Kaiser (Co-founder and Head of Design for personal.ai):
Kristie is an SDSU graduate with an extensive background in design and the San Diego Startup Ecosystem. Jumping into working with startups right out of college, Kristie has been a part of 4 startups across various industries, including biotech, hospitality, and tech — all of which made her fall in love with building from scratch in a small company with a significant impact.
About personal.ai: Personal.ai is an AI extension of your mind trained on your memories and enables you to scale yourself without limits.
Our technology is trained on your spoken or written thoughts so that your AI can help you recall your knowledge, generate new ideas, and even interact with others regardless of your availability in person. We are in the early phases of finetuning our product; many of the capabilities we share today are still being developed. If you’d like to take a deep dive or get set up to start training your AI as soon as possible- join our Beta for free here: personal.ai.
It’s a great tool to use at events or when reading articles like these so you can remember all the little details.
