The Value of Design to Startups

Design and marketing are way more important than engineering for consumer Internet companies, argues angel investor Dave McClure

By Dave McClure

Over the past five years I've consulted with and/or invested in about 50 startups. I've gotten to know a lot of entrepreneurs and a fair number of the venture capital and angel investors who are backing these companies, most of which are in the consumer Internet field. And guess what? Probably more than half of the startups, and more than 90% of the investors, have no clue what they are doing when it comes to user experience and online marketing.

So what, right? Surely design and marketing aren't that important? Investors don't have to be experts in every field. After all, you don't expect every football coach to be an ex-football player.

Well, actually, yes I do.

Symphonies of Code

Design and marketing aren't just as important as engineering: They are way more important. Here are the two main reasons why:

1. Addictive User Experience (Design) and Scalable Distribution Methods (Marketing) are the most critical components of success in consumer Internet startups, not Pure Engineering Talent.

We have this image of space-age whiz kids such as The Woz [Steve Wozniak], Bill Gates, and Bill Joy, who could disassemble and reassemble a transistor radio, a toaster oven, or a mainframe computer, and who grew up writing symphonies of code and wondrous applications before they even lost their virginity.

Those guys were studs. They were god-like, and for their businesses—building computers or advanced software or operating systems—that kind of horsepower matters. It's the same, perhaps, for companies such as Google (GOOG), PayPal, Facebook, or Mozilla. You need a lot of geek to build search engines, or Web browsers, or fraud systems, or serious CAD software, or the movies that Pixar puts together.

But how much tech does it take to create most basic input-output forms for consumer Internet software, when so much of the underlying infrastructure has been built into the operating system and browser platform?

Visual Imagery and Copywriting

It's actually pretty easy to write a Web-friendly app or Web site these days. But it's still incredibly difficult to create visually appealing interfaces and, beyond that, to design them in ways that are compelling and engaging, drive calls to action, and are measurably adept at getting more customers to use your products. Figuring out game mechanics and activation, designing reinforcement schedules, visual imagery, landing page tests, and copywriting—all this is not trivial.

And if you have some success with your design, you still have to chase the scalable, predictable, profitable channels of customer acquisition … otherwise known as marketing. These days, most marketing isn't traditional PR and product placement. It's a very technically intensive discipline filled with SEO, SEM, social platforms, e-mail, widgets, social media, viral marketing, blogging, video, user-generated content, etc., etc. It's a traditional marketing person's worst nightmare—tens if not hundreds of potential marketing channels and campaigns with unknown costs, techniques, and payoff.

I went back for a second helping of Avatar this Sunday. There’s a scene early on in the movie where one of the scientists walks across the lab carrying the “mobile computer slab of the future.” We’ve seen one of these in almost every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years. It comes free with a jetpack, I suppose. Except this time, one month later, my 12 year old son turns to me and whispers “Look Dad, it’s an iPad.”

As many others have noted, the release of the iPad might be the cannonball into the consumer device pool the iPhone dipped its toes in. It’s also been referred to as a thing that sits between that iPhone and your laptop. I see it as more of a fork in the road. It’s the thing many people will get INSTEAD of a laptop.

The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.

It’s the payoff to all the work done by multiple industries over the last 20–30 years. It’s the subtraction of 20lbs of textbooks in my son’s backpack, and the device I finally feel comfortable buying my parents.

That’s why I was surprised by the reaction the iPad got the day it launched. Following along on Twitter I was seeing things like ‘underwhelming’, ‘meh’ , ’it’s not open’, ‘it’s just a big iPhone’, etc. And most of this stuff was coming from people who design and build interactive experiences. As designers, and technologists we’re very much aware that the interfaces we build are for people who are “not us,’ but we still haven’t made that leap about the concept of “computing.”

The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.

They want the thing in the movies.

As an industry, we need to understand that not wanting root access doesn’t make you stupid. It simply means you do not want root access. Failing to comprehend this is not only a failure of empathy, but a failure of service.

Written by Mike Monteiro on February 3, 2010 |

I completely concur.

Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph. See more of her Found Functions series at Nikkigraziano.com.

When graphed, this trigonometry function produces an ever-repeating wave of peaks and valleys that mirror the natural curves Graziano sees in plants. (October 2008.)

“It’s a pretty famous function,” Graziano says of this bell curve in the sky. (June 2009.)

Surrounded by piles of snow last spring, Graziano says she couldn’t help but take some photos like this one. (April 2009.)

Nature speaks a language, Graziano says, and sometimes that language can look pretty complicated—like the function whose graph mirrors the shape of this pile of sand. (March 2009.)

Hollywood’s going 3-D, and so has Graziano. She ventured into the third dimension to produce graphs that map the contours of plants. This one is a hyperbolic parabloid.

This function describes 3-D representations of a repeating sine curve.

WOW.

Incredible.

Very interesting.