Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer
A lot of early stage founders are incredible engineers, but lack the ability to make things look “right”. We’ve seen a bunch of our friends launch products to no reception, some of which seemed due to poor design decisions (like, making buttons hard to find or a landing page that looks like it might steal your credit card).
Two years ago, two of my closest friends started a company, raised a small round, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on their initial branding. That was a substantial percentage of their funding, and then their brand entirely changed once they learned more about their customer. After I saw them waste a ton of time and money on this, I realized that it ought to be possible to build software that could have done just as good of a job as the design agency. At the core of it, the designers asked my friends a bunch of questions about how they want their company to be perceived by customers, offered them colors and fonts and a design aesthetic that conveyed those feelings, and then created a mockup of a website that incorporated those elements. So, I decided to build software to do just that.
With Parade, we have taken a traditional brand design interview and turned it into a self-serve software product. You answer a series of questions about how you want your brand to be perceived and receive design aesthetic suggestions based on them. We use machine learning to identify design elements (such as fonts, colors, layouts, use of color, density of information, line and button styles, and visuals) that project the way you want your brand to feel, then present them to you as simple choices. To power the suggestions, we collected training data from both designers and non-designers to understand what emotional reactions these design elements evoke. Because of this technology, we are able to identify the design aesthetics that you want without having to iterate repeatedly or spend hours searching for inspiration. After you make your choices, we use the math behind design theory (such as an algorithm to expand one color into a range of colors that accounts for the difference in perceived contrast based on hue, saturation, and lightness) to flesh out your brand [0].
Right now, after onboarding, you are able to access all of your design elements in a style guide for free through the dashboard. It includes your colors and your fonts, plus a place to download your logo and icon in a few colors. You can see an example of what this looks like here: https://app.getparade.com/hackernews/style-guide or here: https://app.getparade.com/hooli/style-guide. This is similar to the output startups get from a first engagement with a designer, which helps you set up basic, consistent styling for your website and social media profiles.
At this point, we’ve helped thousands of companies create their brands, including YC-backed companies like WellPrincipled (https://www.wellprincipled.com/), Enable (https://www.enable.us/) and MeterFeeder (https://www.meterfeeder.com/).
The next step beyond style guides would be to automatically generate brand assets—things like pitch decks, landing pages, and social media posts. We're working on that. We haven't completely automated it yet, but ...
74 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadI've used Looka in the past for our company Savio (https://www.savio.io). How are you different from them?
Looka is a great tool for creating a logo, and they're primarily focused on that -- and I've seen some great logos created on there.
We're especially focused on creating the right design aesthetic for you. If you're building a fun consumer SAAS business, you might lose credibility if your website is super formal and unapproachable. Fonts, colors, information density, use of white space, use of imagery, and other design elements influence the way your brand is perceived. Parade makes recommendations across these dimensions, which should help you create the aesthetic you're going for.
What do your customers do after using your service? Create a website / app design from scratch using your brand guidelines with a consulting designer?
Serious question btw!
It took me one full day to find a website builder that would have pre-built options of design. I found Landen (now called Umso: https://www.umso.com/)
Our website (https://newscatcherapi.com/) is still on Umso, and I'm happy with it.
However, fonts, logo, mails, etc. I'd love to have it all together at the very beginning.
But, your design, logo, fonts can be awful, so do not spend time/money/efforts on that when you just begin. Use product like Parade and start solving a problem.
No one will care about your design as long as you solve a problem, but NOT the other way round.
We've built product without even having a website. Just cold outreach and talking about how we solve our customer's problems.
I personally look only at reviews (trying to tell what's paid or fake) / price.
Some (if not most) of the best experiences and services I purchased had terrible websites and I often thought about offering to prop something up for them - it's not a terribly lucrative field though.
Anecdotally, I found it easier to raise money after having a nice designed website.
If you can deliver on your promise then I would definitely be a user and a customer.
I am a software engineer and the design part is always a big problem for me, until a friend and ex-colleague of mine arrives.
But I've been promised these things in the past, and wasted money on them. 99 Designs, Freelancer, ThemeForest (including asking the theme developer for customisations). I've tried them all, and they've never worked. So I approach this fairly sceptically.
But I'd love to see it work.
Usually the biggest problem is not the up-front design - there are some lovely ones out there. It's "how do I map this solution for this problem into a UI that makes sense?". And I can't imagine how you systematise that, but it would be amazing if you could.
Just having a few off-the-rack workflows that are easy to play with would be helpful.
- I don't trust myself picking colors, fonts, etc, and I'm worried that when I go to buy a UI template or whatever my terrible decision for colors won't be "fixed". I'd much rather pay you to go through this with me based on my inputs and trust your expertise.
- For typography, do people really use custom typography? Not only does it add bloat to your bundles, it seems defaulting to the system UI provides a better UX?
- For colors, I really want an entire palette for both light and dark mode. I don't see an option for dark mode at all, is this possible?
- I was worried your pricing would be obscene since you can't get to it without going through the process, but it's actually very reasonable. I think you should let people know up front what the pricing is, don't be afraid of showing it.
Great idea though!!
It's funny - we've heard the "I don't trust myself" sentiment often. We want to make you believe that your choices are great (and, most of the time, they are). We've thought about offering to have a designer take a glance at what you've chosen, but don't yet feel confident that it would solve the problem.
And great point! We don't yet have a dark mode setting, but it's something we want to build.
I noticed you had Google Slides support (presumably for making themes based on the generated brand kit). Any chance of that coming to PowerPoint too? Making PowerPoint themes by hand is the worst, so anything to alleviate that would be welcome.
suggestion - dont make me signup just to try you out - see if you can bring out at least part of your process from behind your login wall.
Creating a brand and getting a style guide is free. We charge in the hundreds-of-dollars range for the agency side of our business.
I get that this is more about branding than product design. But, I'd like to point out that if you are making a product, someone is doing the design for that product, whether they realize it or not.
P.S. Have you read Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things? Your comment "someone is doing the design for that product, whether they realize it or not" reminded me of a lot of the examples in the book.
This would be an amazing fit for my side projects that are a little more serious than "do my own 30s design," but not nearly so serious (yet) as "find, manage, and pay a freelance designer".
And it seems like a great business too. The upsell prices are a little hefty for side project, but if I build a project on this that gets a bit of traction, a few hundred bucks for a landing page / ui library / marketing email template starts to seem pretty attractive. Especially if it lets me put of "use a real designer" until a little further along in the product's lifecycle. :)
RE:Ownership - you own what you create. We plan to have a law firm help us spell this out explicitly for us at some point in the near future.
I would love to see this combined with a tool that helps with choosing an available domain name. I’ve used heaps of these and never found one that does it well.
A startup's branding is an early indicator of a teams commitment and skill. Even with todays Bootstrap themes I sometimes get fooled into thinking a product or service has dedication behind it when it turns out to be a smoke screen to test the market for interest. This kind of service accelerates this effect; now the ones who do commit and carry the skill and experience to pull off a successful startup will be competing against - as was already mentioned in this thread - personal projects or founders with no regard or respect for branding. What if the tables were turned: "Got a great marketing team but no interest in features or solving a real problem? Our AI can fix that for you!". Should such a team succeed?
I said I wasn't entirely confident about this, because I also realise this is what progress looks like and it is a natural step forwards in the direction we're headed. But is it a destination we want to reach?
Most small businesses need little design and little code to deliver value.
This has a positive decentralising effect on the economy. Instead of having a single billion dollar company you'll have competing small companies.
Reputation and testimonials will weed out bad actors or companies that can't deliver value, as they already do.
https://snipboard.io/kzcIhm.jpg
P.S. I wish I was cheeky enough to make that jab at freelancers ;)
Sorry, maybe I am the only one who thinks this, but it clearly has an impact on how I rate your expertise...
Your customer's logos look nice though...
P.S. there are a lot of good Golden Spiral/Golden Ratio memes [0] out there. If you have one that you like, feel free to share it with me [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-golden-ratio
It looks more like 2 half circles of different sizes glued together. Maybe the ratio of the 2 circles is the golden ratio?