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49 Comments

MVPs we once knew are dead! 😵

If you look at the graph, you can see as Figma dominated and made UI/UX design not only accessible to all, but also more efficient - the global standard of interface design rose to a whole new level.

That's why all our favourite platforms needed a redesign to stay competitive and cross-platform. This includes: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest and many others. Within the last 3 years alone they all had huge major facelifts.

This is because around pre 2018-ish the MVP model allowed you to be scrappy; A well positioned product that is overall functional and somewhat reliable had a lot of potential in the competitive landscape (usability and enjoyable was not as important).

Ahhh... I remember those days, launching a frankenstein MVP of my product Glorify brought in $300K in revenue within 3 months of launching on Product Hunt!
Glorify 2019 Stripe Revenue

Today Figma has made it impossible for founders to cut corners in the design of their MVP. Hence why so many MVP's are launching to market extremely polished and ready for scale. Just check all the Product Hunt companies at the top of the charts everyday, They're all extremely polished. In fact you will even find many UI/UX designers are either solo founding or part of a founding team of rapidly growing startups.

Using Figma - with the right UI/UX culture in house, you can easily design an MVP that is not just functional and reliable, but also usable and enjoyable! PLUS You can pass a high fidelity clickable prototype for development with so much clarity on what needs to be built without having to iterate on the code level. From there scaling new features becomes a breeze!

Do check out this video where I unpack this topic much deeper:
https://youtu.be/mWdTKEL0zog

posted to Icon for group Design and UX
Design and UX
on April 6, 2023
  1. 12

    Nope, bad take. MVPs are as shabby and ugly as ever. It is just that the public launch these days are much later and the shabby MVP has already been validated earlier. Figma has nothing to do with it. It's just a wider market now so you hear about products much later in the cycle. If you are an angel or have access to deal flow, you can see much better how shabby the MVPs are.

    Edit: Also this is just an ad for your business masquerading as a "helpful article". People have high BS detectors and this sort of ploy makes you look desperate and unimaginative and slightly shady.

    1. 8

      +1, the self promo here is really getting out of hand. If I see that one guy comment about his Evoke AI API one more time im gonna lose it.

      1. 1

        Ya ads like this really irk me. If they are just honest and say, hey guys, does anybody need this product I launched, that is a much nicer take than this whole "help" that they provide.

        1. 3

          lol I have 300K users on Glorify of an audience completely irrelevant to Indie Hackers, this is not an ad... This is just my learnings...

          1. 0

            You have 300 THOUSAND users with a revenue of $2.3K per month? Why do you keep blatantly lying I have no idea. Don't double down just because you are caught.

            1. 4

              I'm sorry what did I lie about exactly?

              Im open about revenue, and wrote articles on Indie Hackers about our MRR struggles already, hence why I'm happy to openly add our Stripe verified revenue, that's what you saw right lol?

              Doesn't change the fact that we have a high active user range and a completely different ICP to Indie Hackers.

              We are VC backed by UK's top VC Fuel ventures (exit to Adobe, early investor in Paddle) - Design tools are always at loss. It's a high volume super free B2C model and we raise funding based on MAU, like Canva not MRR...
              Our sales cycles are only a few times periodically per year, and out biggest sale was our launch in 2019 on one time purchases.

              Boom, here' our Stripe.
              https://www.loom.com/share/38617d2674c643d4a5a832a09d674abe

              Go ahead find Glorify on Fuel's portfolio page https://fuel.ventures/portfolio-eis.

              Also drop our URL on Similar Web or Ahrefs: our traffic ranges between 50K pm

              You keyboard trolls are hilarious... Learn buddy learn thank you...

    2. 4

      Good luck getting eaten alive by UI/UX led indiehackers buddy. Built www.blitzit.app , fresh design system and hi-fi prototype under 3 weeks. Shipped to dev, zero code iteration cause everything was super clear, alpha was ready under a couple of months.

      I am part of a portfolio and many founders have achieved the same,
      Wait till AI generative UI comes around. People will be launching polished MVPs like the world owes them money.

      It's not an ad for my business, Indie Hackers aren't my ICP at Glorify - just highlighting the fact that I lived through and capitalised on the pre-2018 MVP, I've tried launching other similar products these days with hardly any success.

      Whilst polishing is getting me tonnes of results. On Twitter alone posting my new bootstrap baby is going bananas. Remember we are talking about polishing design not code or features, and at the moment you can design a super polished MVP within a couple of weeks - THAT'S a smarter version of being "Scrappy".

      Your living pre-2018. Best of luck ;)

      1. 2

        I have redesigned two sites now with AI, but it so much easier, I can confidently say that what took me two weeks to design, I can now design in two days, or less.

        The UI is just better.

        1. 1

          Hi, mind sharing which service did you use for design with Ai?
          I’m really struggling with that aspect :/

          1. 1

            Bing chat, the trick I have discovered is to first visualise what you want and then ask it to design it. Then improve and iterate.

            This is not a marketing stunt, but to show you, I designed https://kekule.setexams.com entirety with it. I was just describing the css I wanted, correct a few and then iterate on that.

            Also designing element by element helps, designing an entire page at once is harder.

            I will also give it a try with designing a flutter app this week.

            1. 1

              That design is really, really bad.

              1. 1

                Thank you. I just have a request though: you can help me improve it by pointing out what's bad, or pointing me to a well designed product page, or pointing me to a resource that can help.

      2. 2

        Again another wrong take. If your MVP needs to be pretty, it is actually a signal that the product you are selling does not solve a hair on fire problem. And also Twitter likes != retention. Are they paying for the product? No.

        1. 3

          I t doesn't need to be pretty to solve the problem yes, BUT regardless - It is pretty!
          Why not have both lol
          Are you saying you'd rather launch an ugly product VS being smart and spending a little more time to polish the UI too?

      3. 2

        AI for UI is already here. And it's a fancy UI Kit.

        The secret to UX/UI is not making nice looking visuals, it's understanding target users and tailoring the product to them.

        1. 2

          I agree. UI/UX is mostly solving your user's problem. But aesthetic has a huge impact on usability. there a many studies that shows an interface of poor aesthetic vs beautiful aesthetic with the same UX - obviously better aesthetic always wins - especially considering the standard people are used to these days.

    3. 1

      I agree, but from a UI/UX perspective.

      Figma doesn't "make" UI/UX. It's a tool that lets you add boxes and text to a canvas. Kind of silly to say that it's usage means everyone has to be UI/UX focused. Sketch was around before, Framer, Protopie, and even Photoshop and Illustrator were all used to design things before. I don't think the tool is the reason.

      1. 2

        Your forgetting what Figma has brought to the table in the last 2 years.

        • Smart animate
        • Component variants
        • interactive components

        These features are what changed the game for UI/UX designers. We can now design a high fidelity prototype (as Zander says) "super fast"!

        1. 1

          I’m not forgetting. I’m a lead product designer.

          None of those things are unique or new. All of them were provided by other software like Protopie or Framer before Figma did it.

          And I’m not saying Figma doesn’t do it better, but it’s not Figma’s banner that has caused UX to be a necessity. It’s just the growth of the market.

          When all company’s have software, there has to be a differentiator. Those differentiators eventually become table stakes for everything else.

          Has nothing to do with Figma.

          1. 1

            I am aware of Protopie and Framer, I lived through them, but all of those tools required disconnected workflows. Figma has it all in one place and makes it 100x more efficient. And yes part of the argument is democratization of UI/UX design on a global scale that Figma caused since it was on cross platform on the cloud.

            So Figma YES has a lot to do with the rate and quality of how software is built today. It's impossible to deny that.

            1. 1

              No it doesn’t. Sketch was the tool that ushered in UX to the mainstream, and even then it has nothing to do with why start ups need to look good now.

              It’s user expectations. You’re linking a tool to it, and the tool has nothing to do with it. It would have happened regardless of Figma existing.

              1. 2

                There is no denying Sketch pioneered UI/UX design tools. But again, i'm specifically talking about post 2018, it's too much of a coincidence companies like Spotify, Microsoft, Google moved to Figma around the same time and then followed that by huge updates across their design systems. Watch my video linked above, I break down the history with real references.

                Users expectations are result of great design, and great design is a result of democratization of UI/UX on a global scale.

    4. 1

      I love ugly startups

      1. 1

        Well I think now the statement "2015 called, they want their MVP back" should definitely be a thing.

  2. 3

    This reads like a poorly scripted AD for your service and Figma . Who writes trash like this ? "Today Figma has made it impossible for founders to cut corners in the design of their MVP."
    Users don't get a shit about Figma if the product solves their problem

    1. 1

      Gotta love them Indie Trolls... Goodluck winning design-led companies <3

      1. 1

        Not a troll at all, I've followed IH since it started. You probably thought you were being clever with this clickbait post but it actually just makes you look like a slimy wannabe salesman

        1. 1

          What exactly am I selling? My productized service that's not even linked here? Or my Startup Glorify whose users are completely irrelevant to this community.

          I wrote this article because:

          1. I truly believe the MVP model we knew pre-2018 is dead, just because myself and many others I know are designing Indie products faster when I produce high fidelity prototypes.
          2. Yes, I do wan't people to check out my YouTube channel linked on this post. I'd love to share more of my experience.

          I'd be lying if I said I didn't want followers on both YouTube or Indie Hackers. Why would a "followers" metric even exist on this platform if not for users to capitalise on it. I'm not desperate for it, but I'd like to share content I believe in, as I enjoy it - of course with my story cause that backs up what I am saying. And my story involves some of my startups. Believe me I don't need a couple sign ups from this article.

          I genuinely just want to share. If you have a problem with how I share my experience, you have the right to critique the belief and open that discussion, but to assume my intention and cast rocks at my personality makes you look like a troll with zero EQ.

    1. 2

      Yup, it's an ad for their service veiled as a "helpful article."

    2. 0

      Yes I really do wan't people to read... that's just smart writing - good thing the title is true to the content right? ;)

  3. 2

    You also have to consider the rise of frameworks focused on UI, actually that is yardstick for most of them. Something to do with UI is in their branding text. This had lowered the design bar long before AI came in.

  4. 2

    Midjourney relies on discord to allow it's users to generate images and it is a huge success. No polished UI, no figma. They focused on bringing value first and it is working pretty well for them.

    1. 1

      Midjourney is piggy backing the beautiful experience Discord has built over the years - It's a smart shortcut and a community led approach which is very different to most SaaS.

      If you pay attention to my article, I am talking about launching an unpolished MVP in terms of UI/UX. If you know the tools, you'll easily be able to design a beautiful MVP within 2 weeks or less. It's happening with many indie founders I know.

  5. 2

    I disagree. Scrappy startups are still a big thing and I don’t think we’ll ever stop seeing them. So many launches with still the Vercel favicon. It’s not going anywhere. It’s part of the culture and also one of the best way to validate ideas: not waste any extra time on designing before getting to know if the idea is even worth designing.

    1. 0

      New scrappy = better design shipped in a 2 weeks or less. It's not a waste of time when the tools allow you do make it happen super fast.

  6. 1

    well said and very true! the quality bar for new digital products is higher than ever before and this trend will continue. this is why it's critical to hire designers!

    1. 1

      Finally one indiehacker who has his head screwed on well. Thank you my friend <3

  7. 1

    Great, In theory. What are some success stories you can think of as examples of using this new model?

  8. 1

    Has nothing to do with Figma or the way MVP's are built. They can still be really naive and simplistic and look terrible.

    On PH, they simply launch, those are no MVPs any more 99% of the time. So that's why they look great. And also, with higher competition and more people building more products than ever before, yeah you wanna win every single inch of advantage you can get. Still, MVP's still look as shitty at some point of the journey as they used to, and that's a good thing (in terms of priorities).

    1. 1

      Well design systems and high fidelity prototyping allows you to polish your front-end aesthetic super easily, so seems redundant when the tools allow you to do it much faster than ever before.

  9. 1

    SLC - Simple, Lovable, Complete vs MVP - https://blog.asmartbear.com/slc.html

    1. 2

      Love this share, always interesting to see people reinventing the wheel for perspective.

  10. 1

    thanks for your thoughts and your video

  11. 0

    Can't say I agree. You can launch websites with 75% of the page being whitespace around your content, and text in the center of the screen with a form or demo, and users are not deterred by it at all

    1. 1

      I'm talking about SaaS and apps mainly, not websites.

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