Linear founder Karri Saarinen on how good design can accelerate growth

So let's talk about more practical terms. So I always think about, startups are about growth because like you start from zero, you need to keep growing, you need to get users and customers. And what growth essentially usually is that you need to acquire people. You need to get them use the product and then you need to keep them using the product. If you lose them, then again you don't have those users and customers. So let's look at the different stages. So acquisition. I think the design can help there. Like just do like it. Like you can create interest. Like if something looks. People are like visual. Like when you see something that looks cool or interesting, I think it, it kind of like attracts people to pay more attention. Attention. And that's always something. Like it's, that's like one of your challenges as a startup. Like people are not paying attention. So design can help with that. It's also like, helps with the kind of clarity of the product. I think like if you have a good designer, they can help you to clarify like the workflows or just the onboarding that people understand the value of the product better. And then also obviously if the product is well designed, people likely will use it more. If they use it more likely they will keep using it. And that way the design can help in all of these steps. If you don't have good design or you haven't invested in it, you're probably creating friction in all of these steps which then hinders your growth as a startup. So that's just a very basic example with our company. So we launched it a couple years ago. We just put a website and a blog post out there and we did spend some time on the design, but it wasn't like something like we spent months on it, but it was like I think people found it really interesting. And so that's why we were able to get 10,000 users on our wait list after like two months. And I think that's really good start when you start building a product and then you can start pulling those people in when you're ready. Even today we still have people that come to our product just because they like the design. They don't necessarily have any other justification for it in their heads, but they're just like, yeah, I like it, so that's why I use it. And I think it's great. I don't care why people become our customers, I just care that they become our customers. So again, I think there's like an example how it can help.