Surviving without a designer? More life thriving without one.
Honestly I think many startups at an early stage don’t need designers at all and they just want to look trendy (which admittedly is critical for consumer-focused companies that live and die on becoming trendy, but that’s not what I do).
The best designer for an early stage startup these days is someone with not awful visual/UX taste (no need for a specialist or a visual prodigy; most teams I’ve met have at least somebody who isn’t hopeless in this respect); but with a strong understanding of their target users and what they’re familiar with, so you can just copy prior art as is relevant. Much better than taking a designer who knows nothing about the space and needing to transfer your learned experience into their brain somehow.
Most startups aren’t doing anything truly novel from a UI standpoint so why reinvent the wheel? Designers become more useful when you stop having strong communication and trust in your team since it just got too big for that.
Honestly I think many startups at an early stage don’t need designers at all and they just want to look trendy (which admittedly is critical for consumer-focused companies that live and die on becoming trendy, but that’s not what I do).
The best designer for an early stage startup these days is someone with not awful visual/UX taste (no need for a specialist or a visual prodigy; most teams I’ve met have at least somebody who isn’t hopeless in this respect); but with a strong understanding of their target users and what they’re familiar with, so you can just copy prior art as is relevant. Much better than taking a designer who knows nothing about the space and needing to transfer your learned experience into their brain somehow.
Most startups aren’t doing anything truly novel from a UI standpoint so why reinvent the wheel? Designers become more useful when you stop having strong communication and trust in your team since it just got too big for that.