So you want to become a design founder: 6 superpowers you probably already have
Designers are built to be founders
You design enough products for others, and eventually you feel like you can do it for yourself.
On a late summer day in 2016, I held in my surprise as I absorbed the number scratched crudely across the wrinkled napkin on the coffee shop table sitting in front of me. It was a percentage.
Equity… for me.
I looked up and said, “I’m in.”
Fast forward to 2024 and to no great fanfare, I silently signed the Docusign acquisition contract alone in my home office, officially ending my almost decade long journey building and scaling Lead Scout.
Hi, I’m a “design founder”
Every designer I know is teeming with startup ideas. And so many have “Founder” listed on their bios.
But what does “Design founder” really even mean?
Perhaps the job description would look something like this:
- As a design founder, you are responsible for owning the experience.
But this is often an amorphous responsibility. It’s hard to put into words exactly what that means.
At Lead Scout, we had a triad of co-founders operating the business – the CEO, Chris, a strong sales lead, the CTO, Matt, the builder of our tech stack, and me, Joe, “a designer.”
My official titles on paper were COO, Treasurer, and Secretary – yes, all three, as mandated by the State of Delaware. But in emails, I would often sign off as “Head of Design” or “Head of Product”.
And beyond the titles on paper, I did almost everything including cleaning the kitchen sink: I designed the product, kept a tight grip on our brand usage, produced marketing and sales materials, hired and fired people, ran payroll, stood on tradeshow floors hawking our wares, managed our paid ads, reviewed legal documents, responded to customer service tickets, wrote help center articles, did demos, cold called, and so much more.
A closet full of hats is the job description
As a founder, you have to cover the necessities of the business, even if the task is outside of what you’re good at. So this wide breadth of responsibilities did not come as a surprise – it’s simply an unavoidable part of choosing to start a business.
But my cofounders’ focuses seemed so much more defined.
Chris championed The Distribution™ and Matt owned The Software™ categories that directly yielded real world outputs: customer sign ups and a published app used daily by our users.
I struggled to define exactly what my focus as a design founder should be. What is my output?
After years immersing myself in the role, it finally clicked.
A design founder’s superpower is being widely dynamic.
Designers are uniquely capable of being widely dynamic. Us designers don’t fit into a mold of “code this” or “sell that”, and that’s precisely our superpower.
The 6 superpowers of a Design Founder
It took Lead Scout 6 years to get to product market fit.
If you had told me that it would take that long at that coffee shop way back in 2016, I would have slid that wrinkled napkin right back across the table. But when you’re halfway through the startup roadtrip, you tend to keep throwing spare tires onto the car whenever you get a flat.
You just do whatever it takes to keep going.
And boy am I glad that we had the resilience to stick with it. By 2024, Lead Scout became one of the top rated canvassing apps in the country for home service pros.
By sticking with it, I learned that, as a designer, I have 6 critical superpowers. Each of these superpowers proved to be indispensable to our success at Lead Scout.
Superpower #1: We sniff out traction
I’m obsessed with finely tuned, well-designed, and polished products. But I don’t for a second admit that’s where great products start.
All great products start with traction. The good news is that sniffing this out tends to be the most fun part for us designers!
The Lead Scout idea was simple - put a mobile app in a home service sales rep’s hand where they could lay down a “pin” on a map on a home that they deemed to be a good prospect, and then in one tap send a postcard to that home to connect with that homeowner. Over time, their map would fill with pins that they would have a great picture of all the homes they’ve sent postcards to.
In 2017, we released our first beta app. We gave it to 5 local roofing contractors to try. The app wasn’t built well, it would never scale – but it was simple, and that was enough to test our assumptions.
It let each roofing contractor do the following:
- Follow their location on a map as they drive around neighborhoods
- Place a marker on a home address that has roof issues
- Specify a roofing issue for that home
- Send a postcard to that address
We charged our beta testers $1 per postcard. It didn’t take long, but soon, we had our first $1… then $20… then $100… then $1000. This was traction!
Our product wasn’t ideal. Honestly, it barely even worked for the 5 people that used it. But it was enough for us to test our idea and validate that it was worth investing in the next iteration, which is exactly what we did.
Polish without traction is useless.
You see, we designers - we’re great at prototyping. In fact, we love it! And it’s these lo-fi tests that signal if you’re headed in the right direction and should keep pushing.
Design founders are great at finding traction, and polish without traction is useless.
Superpower #2: We obsessively make meaning until market fit
Those initial hits of traction can be intoxicating, but ultimately they just represent the first step towards the larger goal: true product market fit.
Most startups never unlock product-market fit, and that’s why 90%+ fail.
But here’s the thing, designers are uniquely gifted at cracking the code to product-market fit.
A roundabout journey to product-market fit
We launched Lead Scout’s first public app to the Apple App Store in January of 2019, a basic app that let home service pros save home addresses on a mapview and send a series of postcards to the addresses they saved.
And from the outside, we looked like a serious business. But in the back office, Lead Scout was still a hobby project.
None of us were focused on it full time.
Through those first few years, we experienced a good amount of activity, acquiring a few hundred customers, but very few stuck around. And it was just a hobby project, we weren’t growing it like we needed to to actually make it work.
Lead Scout Inc is born
In 2021, Chris Hofstra, our CEO, and I decided to take it more seriously. Matt Rozema jumped into our founding team as our CTO, we raised some private capital, and we restructured the business - incorporating in Delaware in July of 2021.
Our 2 big breaks
We expanded our mail service, making it easy to not just send targeted postcards to prospects, but also to neighboring homes around jobsites. And we also added handwritten notes for a more highly personalized touch.
This led quickly to a few big breaks.
One of the largest home goods distributors in the nation came to us and wanted to offer this service of “Notes to Neighbors” to all of their contractors, along with access to our app to give them a record of all of the prospects they were marketing to.
And around the same time, GAF Solar approached us to start a similar program focused on helping contractors get more solar leads in the neighborhoods in which they were working.
We dove head first into each of these opportunities, building tech alongside our new design partners to support all the mail marketing and field prospecting.
Churn was eating us alive
The model just wasn’t sticking. Our “big breaks” dissolved as contractors would try out the service, and then churn after a few months.
We desperately needed to understand what motivated our customers. What do our customers find meaningful?
We were already talking to our users daily on demos or by phone, but with my designer hat on, I took the extra step to lean hard into product analytics.
I learned how to write basic SQL queries to start to understand the data from our customers and glean insights. Matt and I set up AWS Quicksights to get reports. Chris and I spent hours digging into Stripe reporting and building our own Google Sheets analyses to try to figure out exactly how and when customers were converting, and where they were churning.
And we used Mixpanel to start to understand key SaaS metrics around conversion, retention, churn, and activity.
And then, product-market fit
18 months after we incorporated and took on funding, we finally unlocked it.
We found fit with contractors who used door-to-door to generate new leads. They loved using our app to track their door knocks. In fact, they became dependent on it.
But this fit only came after consistently asking the question “What do our customers find meaningful?”, constantly staying aware, and week by week keeping a pulse on our product analytics and customer feedback - only then could we finally unlock product market fit.
Designers push through failure by pursuing meaning
As designers, we’re gifted at seeing the broader picture while also getting our hands dirty with the details.
We have the unique ability to dive into whatever needs to be done and make meaning out of it - like cracking open a tool like Mixpanel or a SQL database and just workshopping towards an set of insightful reports that can unlock those critical “A ha!” moments for the business.
Very few other people are willing… or even capable of… extending themselves like that. But that’s exactly what is needed to get to product-market fit, the point that 90% of startups fail to reach.
Superpower #3: We iterate, replicate, automate to scale
In order to successfully scale a business, you have to recognize what’s working and automate it so that you can move onto a new problem and not get stuck with busy work on the thing that is already working.
The path to this is:
- Figure out what’s working through quick tests and iterations (See #1 Re: traction)
- Prove that you can replicate that success multiple times (See #2 Re: product market fit)
- Scale it through automation
Design founders love to prototype a lot of ideas and set up systems around things that are working. We love to tinker with gradients in Figma as much as we like to optimize Instagram to Webflow customer acquisition funnels and workshop long-term vision boards in Miro.
Designers are able to watch the stars while pulling weeds
Product-market fit can drown you
At first, we held the hand of every single customer that used Lead Scout. Each demo felt like a custom coaching session. But after finding fit, we quickly started running out of time.
We desperately needed to figure out a way to 10x our time.
Designers are systems thinkers
In the product, my North Star was always to maximize our users’ success in their door knocking efforts - but I had to start consistently asking myself how we could help them do that better in an automated fashion. Every product feature was built through this lens.
I jumped into Intercom and started to architect and launch automated onboarding flows, retention-focused drip messaging around trials and subscriptions, and celebratory messages when customers reached certain milestones.
We vigorously sought out all the areas of our business where we had product market fit and were spending too much time, and we sought new ways of automating it, without losing any of the value to our users.
Designers have the unique superpower of establishing systems that work at scale, but still tenderly maintain the value to the customer..
Superpower #4: We love to show-and-tell
To really achieve scale, distribution is everything. You can build the best product, but if no one knows about it, it’s dead.
I became a growth hacker. I had to learn how to run ads and optimize analytics across Facebook, Google and Instagram, study best formats for content to get engagement, optimize our SEO with SEMrush, record and edit video with Capcut, Final Cut Pro and more, produce podcasts with StreamYard, do motion design with After Effects, and more.
Chris and I took “founder-led growth” seriously. We toggled on “Professional-mode” on our socials and pressed play on our selfie-cams. We started talking about what we were up to constantly, engaging in forums where our community was active, and generating humorous memes that tapped into the Zeitgeist of door-knocker sales culture.
We learned how to work with the algorithm and post in a hook, story, offer format.
We got millions of views and built a public following.
Our activity led to opportunities.
We were invited onto podcasts. And we even hosted some of our own digital content.
Our tradeshow calendar filled up. I designed sales enablement PDfs, product how-to videos, landing pages and then manned the tradeshow floors where we used those materials alongside Chris.
People with influence started to recommend us. Our platform and the benefits contractors were getting from it got noticed by influencers like Dmitry Lipinskiy, Chris Scoville, and more, and we started to see big names in the industry start to name drop our app and service, which led to even more activity!
Design is a distribution multiplier
When it comes time to broadcast your startup, design is indispensible.
Your outbound materials not only have to look sharp, but they have to hit home with relevant messaging too. Designers are uniquely gifted at distilling a core message down to its essence and then representing it in a gorgeous deliverable, whether that be a PDF, a tradeshow booth background, a demo video, or a podcast script.
Furthermore, designers are really great at trying new tools and figuring out what works (and what doesn’t). Remember? We love to prototype!
Ultimately, we implicitly understand that the show must go on!
Superpower #5: We are predisposed to self-critique
Designers are the best in the world at self-critique. We can look at our work from a thousand angles and come up with a thousand ways it could be better.
And when our work sucks, we are really good at looking that failure square in the eye and saying:
“Let’s try that again, but differently.”
Playing Moneyball with our business model
By 2022, we took a hard, critical look at our business and asked ourselves the tough questions: What does our money flow actually look like? Where are we making real profit?
Our two revenue streams were clear:
- App subscriptions - customers paying monthly to use our canvassing software
- Mail services - taking a small markup on postcards sent through our platform
But when we analyzed the numbers with brutal honesty, the picture became crystal clear:
Our mail business was bleeding us dry. We were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on mail production, managing complex fulfillment processes, and dealing with constant customer churn around it - all of this effort and capital for just a few cents of margin per piece. Worse yet, contractors would invest heavily in campaigns, then disappear after a few months when they didn’t see immediate ROI.
Our app, on the other hand, was pure gold. Every subscription was essentially 100% profit - it’s software, not physical goods. Better yet, users who loved our app capabilities stuck around longer and became genuinely loyal advocates.
We were taking in a TON of revenue, but much of it went right back out the door as an expense to produce mail.
The data was screaming at us to pivot away from mail, but it took designer-level self-critique to actually listen.
The hard pivot
So we made the call. We discontinued our mail services entirely and doubled down on what was working: Lead Scout is the app that helps contractors track their door-to-door sales.
It was a brutal but necessary decision. We had to walk away from a revenue stream that represented a significant portion of our revenue at the time. But that’s exactly the kind of critical analysis and willingness to kill your darlings that designers do every day.
Navigating the valley of doubt
When we announced the discontinuation of our mail services, we knew there would be a reaction. But we weren’t prepared for what followed.
Our mail users started canceling immediately. En masse.
We were still acquiring new door-to-door users, but the mail cancellations were outpacing our new customer acquisition and quickly bleeding us dry.
The numbers were brutal:
- Month 1: bleeding customers
- Month 2: still bleeding
- Month 3: more bleeding
- Month 4: still bleeding
We were mortified watching our customer count drop month after month. Every fiber of our being wanted to reverse course, to go back to the “safety” of our old model. But we trusted our long-term outlook, and we stayed the course.
We believed - despite the nearterm pain - that this was ultimately going to be the right move.
And then, in month 5… revenue ticked up.
The door-to-door users we were acquiring weren’t just signing up - they were sticking around. They were engaged. They were growing their businesses with our app and telling their friends about it. The unit economics finally made sense.
Designers aren’t afraid to kill our darlings if needed
It’s not just about being willing to identify what’s wrong - it’s about having the courage to act on those insights even when the immediate consequences look catastrophic.
All the best designers I know crave critical feedback. They seek it out because they understand it’s the only way to make their work better. But not everyone is built like this, and I often have to remind myself to wrap my feedback in bubble wrap outside of design circles because not everyone is used to taking constructive critique and positively applying it.
This bottomless desire for refinement - and the courage to act on harsh truths - is implicit to design founders, and it’s an epic superpower.
Superpower #6: We deeply understand people and human behavior
Building a startup with cofounders is an intensely personal journey. You bare all to your cofounders - the good and the ugly. Your emotional baggage and insecurities don’t get left behind when you start a business, and when hard times hit, these all get revealed whether you like it or not.
Never start a business without a cofounder
Starting a business is a bit like parenting - you can of course single parent, but it’s a heck of a lot easier with someone else!
”I quit”
Chris and Matt each called me multiple times over the years and said “I think we should shut it down.” And I did the same to them.
I’ll never forget one particular night in 2022. It was about 10pm, and I was sitting in my sun room when Chris called me.
“I quit,” he said flatly.
I spent the next 2 hours on the phone with him, talking him through why he was the right man for the job, why we needed him, and why what we were building mattered - and I genuinely meant and felt every word. And there were times when I was the one calling him with that same declaration, and he would remind me of the hope we could cling onto.
These weren’t dramatic exits or ultimatums. They were honest moments of exhaustion, doubt, and vulnerability. They happen in the lifecycle of every startup. The kind of raw emotional exchanges that happen when people who care deeply about something reach their breaking point.
Designers understand human psychology
As designers, we spend our careers deeply studying human psychology, understanding what motivates people, what frustrates them, what gives them hope. This experience becomes invaluable when navigating the complex interpersonal dynamics of a founding team.
When your cofounder calls you at 10pm ready to quit, you don’t just hear the words “I quit.” You hear the exhaustion behind it, the fear, the overwhelm. You understand that what they really need isn’t agreement, but perspective, encouragement, and someone to remind them of their “why.”
Designers are trained to see past the surface and understand the deeper human needs at play. In a startup, that skill becomes essential for keeping your team together through the inevitable valleys of despair.
Your ability to read between the lines, to empathize deeply, and to help others process complex emotions - these are the same skills that make you a great designer, and they’re exactly what you need to help your cofounders (and yourself) push through the hardest moments of building a company.
The design founder advantage
As I reflect on our journey with Lead Scout - from a hobby project to a company that’s helped thousands of contractors grow their businesses - I keep coming back to one central truth: designers have a unique advantage as founders.
When designers found businesses, we don’t just build products; we find what works and iterate on it until it’s rock solid, scalable, and beautiful.
We don’t just solve problems; we create meaning for our customers and answer the critical question of why our solutions should exist.
We don’t just manage teams; we deeply understand the human psychology that drives everything forward.
The six design superpowers I’ve outlined aren’t just nice-to-haves - they’re fundamental advantages that can make the difference between a startup that struggles and one that thrives:
- Designers sniff out traction - prototyping and testing assumptions to find what works
- Designers obsessively make meaning until market fit - understanding what truly matters to customers
- Designers iterate, replicate, automate to scale - building systems that work at scale while maintaining value
- Designers love to show-and-tell - naturally great at distribution and growth through compelling storytelling
- Designers are predisposed to self-critique - constantly improving and iterating based on feedback
- Designers deeply understand people and human behavior - navigating complex interpersonal dynamics and motivations
Now is the best time to be a design founder
The entrepreneurial landscape has never been more favorable for design founders. AI tools are democratizing technical capabilities. No-code platforms are lowering barriers to entry. Customers are increasingly sophisticated and expect beautiful, intuitive experiences.
Most importantly, the problems worth solving in the next decade aren’t just technical problems - they’re human problems.
And nobody understands humans quite like designers do.
Start by fixing small problems you care deeply about
You don’t need to quit your job tomorrow. You don’t need a perfect idea or a detailed business plan. You just need to start.
Find a problem that genuinely frustrates you. Build something small that makes it better. Show it to people. Listen to their feedback. Iterate. Repeat. Find smart people who are passionate just like you and bring them into the problem.
You’ve got this.
Your design skills give you everything you need to begin this journey. The rest - the business knowledge, the technical skills, the industry expertise - you can learn as you go.
The world needs more design founders
We live in a world full of products that work but feel broken, services that function but frustrate, experiences that accomplish their goal but leave people feeling empty.
The world needs founders who understand that technology should serve humanity, not the other way around. Founders who believe that how something works is just as important as what it does. Founders who know that the best products don’t just solve problems - they make people’s lives genuinely better.
That’s you. That’s your opportunity. That’s why the world needs more design founders.
So what are you waiting for?
