If you’re a designer, you’re already equipped with some of the most critical tools for building a company. You know how to build a damn good product. You understand the importance of customer discovery, talking to users, and the role it plays in the pursuit of product-market fit.

These advantages are a given, but as I pause to reflect, I’d like to highlight some of the blind spots I had while building my most recent startup Brainfood, a bite-sized learning app for curious adults.

1. Start with design, but move on quickly

On day one, your primary responsibility is rapid learning. Your goal: to prove or disprove hypotheses that could make or break your startup idea.

User testing, asking the right questions, and digging deeper into your audience's motivations, are at the heart of this step. This stage is akin to blindly walking through unexplored territory in a video game, transforming a blank map as you go.

Don’t linger on this step for too long. Move quickly. A great way to constrain this is by setting 2-week time limits to test each hypothesis.

2. A well-designed product is only half the battle.

You’re a product designer so you’ll naturally focus on building a great product. Don’t forget to focus on distribution.

At the onset of building Brainfood, I did an excellent job balancing both. We launched a landing page, got several hundred users to pay for their first month, and garnished over two thousand sign-ups. Once we hit the ground with product development, customer acquisition quietly began to slide.

For the next two years, we continued iterating on the user experience, ultimately shipping over 50 variations of the product. Several thousand happy customers loved Brainfood but as a business, we needed hundreds of thousands and as our cash dwindled, we still hadn’t really nailed distribution.

3. Stay true to your MVP

A potential investor/mentor gave me this advice on day one. Sometimes you still have to make the mistake for yourself.

I assumed our product had to be beautiful, innovative, and well designed. The truth is, some of the best products look like complete shit and customers still love it because it provides so much value.

Don’t waste time massaging pixels or color palettes to perfection. I was leading my team without enough design constraints. We could’ve moved much faster, learned faster, and burned less money by just sucking it up and shipping functional MVPs.

If you’re a designer, I have no doubt your product will eventually be beautiful. But have patience and move quickly until then.

4. Get good at selling. Or find a co-founder who is.

If you’re great at building and selling, you’ll be unstoppable. If you’re not good at selling, find yourself a co-founder who is.

I was distracted by shipping marginally better versions of our product experience. If you build it, they won’t come. You need to dedicate an equivalent volume of resources to figuring out how to sell to and acquire your users.

You’re a d̶̶̶e̶̶̶s̶̶̶i̶̶̶g̶̶̶n̶̶̶e̶̶̶r̶̶̶ problem solver.

These pitfalls aside, you’ll have some immediate and obvious, low-effort advantages as a design founder. Your brand will be strong. Your landing page will be killer. Your deep understanding of your customer’s motivations might be the most important of all. I might be biased, but I think design founders are some of the best poised for success.

Have confidence, keep hustling, and don’t get too caught up with design details! Follow me on Twitter for more design + founder insights on the daily.

Or say hello over at www.hemurahman.com , TikTok, and Insta.