Make me believe you

I personally visit tens of companies' sites a day from new YC grads to Series F companies layering AI services into their offerings. With AI in companies' toolkits, the gap now isn't in sheer implementation risk, it's in whether or not these companies have the stamina and care to see their offering through — which is to say, do they deserve trust.

It feels like every Seed stage site I visit these days includes a three-up grid of metrics close to or slightly above the fold, a list of partner logos, and non-performant scroll animations that show generalized UI. Often, the typography is tiny and hard to tap, an artifact of Claude Design's decided obliviousness to accessibility standards.

The impression I get is — ah, this company decided that they "don't need to focus on design right now." Their users must be developers or buyers who are so clear on their technical needs that the bricks of text are giving "oh my god yes finally this is exactly what I need," or there is so much word-of-mouth and investor pressure to adopt that comprehension doesn't matter. This company conflates design with "let us ship."

Then there are the companies who, when hoping to land an acquisition outcome or a critical fundraising round, will bring in an agency for a brand overhaul to start looking and sounding like a billion dollar company. This has smoke and mirrors to it — expensive efforts to paper over a product that is still impossible to use or with murky fundamentals. This company conflates design with "make us shiny."

Finally, some companies consider design a differentiating tool both on a brand storytelling level and a product functionality level. These companies intend to build for the long-term and often they build in-house teams, who may not know how to work strategically with other departments that hold sway over outcomes. If they're acquired, it's for a bigger win than if they just added shine. When the long-term is in doubt, their 4-year cliff hires are laid off.

In success, this last cohort of companies see design as "make us essential to people," and recognize this outcome as the result of a few different variables that fall under design's domain: giving people respect, earning trust, showing value. These should be cross-domain responsibilities, but often I have found it is design leadership's critical role to hold fast to these when others are distracted by the pure pursuit of shipping or being shiny.

We are in a time where speed to market is praised and paranoia about the long-term is high. Some user bases will conflate being treated badly with being respected — interpreting an ugly interface as praise for their intelligence, an absence of usability implying scarce value. Relying on this is not a scaling tactic. It limits audience and outcomes, hurting growth and retention futures.

Making is no longer the hard part. It's the bare minimum and easiest thing to do. This means differentiation through respect is more critical — after your first few investor-compelled customers, trust is undermined by showing the same three blocks of vanity metrics and the same tiny text as another company who also did the bare minimum of paying for Claude Design tokens to more quickly throw something at the wall.

Shipping product is critical. At a certain stage, so is showing up like a billion-dollar company. Companies that treat these acts as the only needed outputs of design risk stopping at a short-term predictable outcome. Companies that perform these acts from a value system of building something essential have the opportunity to end up bigger, with it seeming inevitable in hindsight.

I don't believe that companies should rely on people feeling pressured into using their products for fear of irrelevance, and I do believe the more lasting gains are in making their products essential. I don't believe that hiring an in-house team is the only way to do this; to some extent, doing that before you know why and how to leverage design is a more expensive and inhumane way to throw things at the wall.

Design, done right, plants seeds of respect, trust, and demonstration of value early in a company's trajectory, and trains all disciplines to see those seeds as outcome unlocks. I believe companies should grow in-house design only when they're ready to really scale the value of that department, and that design still can be what makes the company essential — earning trust, respect, and big outcomes.

When trust is the target, design becomes a strategic unlock for IPO-scale outcomes. It demonstrates why your product deserves to exist. It also leads to what I believe is a game worth playing with our precious few days on earth: not the scramble, not the acqui-hire rest and vest, but the building of something essential with and for people that earns belief.

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Our Mutual Friend is where I do this work.