Being a designer at a startup usually means you have to split yourself in half. You sometimes have to let the other parts of your role at the startup take priority over design. This was a small presentation to the current batch at 500 Startups Accelerator on how to design and build a product that your customers love.

1. Splitting yourself in half
Aye Moah (@ayemoah)
Baydin (@baydin)
Batch #000
Boomerang for Gmail & The Email Game
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2. Personal background
Go by Moah
Technical Background (MIT - CS)
5 years as UX Designer
Big companies & Old startups
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3. My Role at Baydin
UX & Visual Design
PM Front end dev
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4. What’s wrong with this page?
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5. What happens?
Within 15 days, we followed up with the next release.
Within 30 days, we had 70K downloads while staying in private beta.
(for an extension that asks for permission to your entire inbox)
Not a great launch if you count the number of press articles.
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6. With product maturity, NYT print edition will come on its own.
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7. Smaller things that matter
Magic feature that boosted activation 30%
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8. Smaller things that matter
Focus now: improving retention
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9. Caveat
Everything I said is about your relationship with your
customers via the product.
If you are optimizing for funding success and/or your team
ego, this is not going to work for you.
This is not how you become a Silicon Valley legend or the
hottest startup.
This is how you create a product that people love.
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10. Lessons learned.
Design is never done. Let the releases go.
Listen to your customers and focus on your product.
Iterations matter.
Don’t worry about ‘branding’.
Worry about customer’s experience with your product.
Make your product the best on the market, the rest will
come later.
Your job is to contribute to the product success, not just
having a product that looks good.
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