Brand Design Tips From Linear Founder Karri Saarinen

**Aaron Epstein** (0:00)
Building a website for your startup is easier than it's ever been. The hard part is creating a unique brand that really stands out. So today, we'll be joined by Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, to review your websites with an eye for what makes a memorable brand. Welcome to another episode of Design Review. Karri, thank you so much for joining us.

**Karri Saarinen** (0:29)
Well, great to be here.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:30)
So you were the first designer at Coinbase, and you were a lead designer at Airbnb before ultimately starting Linear as co-founder and CEO. I'm curious, what have you learned about how to build a strong brand when you're looking at your website?

**Karri Saarinen** (0:43)
One of the first things I would say that it's something that should be authentic to your company. I think these days, maybe a lot of startups look at, I don't know, Stripe or Linear or some other company out there, and they think, okay, this is the way to build sites or this is the way to build your brand. None of those companies started that way. Stripe's first website was very different than the current website as well as their product. And similar with Linear, it's like the first website was very different than the current website. So I think you should understand what stage of a company you are and what kind of people are you trying to find. These days, there's maybe this trend of, because it's easier to build websites, you might try to build very polished or fancy websites very early on. But what that tells you is it maybe sets the wrong expectation for the user. That if your product is that, and you build it last month, and you don't have everything figured out yet, the product might not be there yet, it's not that polished. It might be set this wrong expectation that this is a very, I don't know, polished product already, and it does all the things that you promised it does.
So I think there's that danger that you go too far, trying to look like a large company or a mature company too early. So I thought maybe it would be interesting to just look at what was the linear website initially, and what it is today to highlight this difference.

**Aaron Epstein** (2:10)
Love that. Let's take a look.

**Karri Saarinen** (2:11)
I bought the first linear website from the Wayback Machine. And in some ways, I would say, I don't know, the website is fairly simple. Like, it doesn't look horrible. But also, I think it's something we created in basically one day. We didn't want to spend weeks or months trying to create a website where we think the actual effort should be put into the product itself. In some ways, some of the things with the brand or with even the copy is that we wanted to use this issue tracking term. Because if you go to any large company website, like you go to Slack or you go to some other productivity app website, it often says something like, this is the work platform or this is where the work happens or something.

**Aaron Epstein** (2:56)
Something very vague, right?

**Karri Saarinen** (2:57)
Yeah, and I think that comes later when you're trying to build this narrative. But in the very beginning, what you're trying to sell is you try to find someone to actually use your product and just understand what it is. So what we did here was that we wanted to put the issue tracking. We knew that that wasn't the long-term vision for the product or the company, but we knew that that's like something that the people we are looking for are just early stage companies and engineers will understand. Issue tracking is a technical project management in a way. It doesn't attract people that don't know what issue tracking is.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:32)
So it sounds like with the copy and specifically your headline, you honed in on the specific phrase that your ideal user would resonate with and be like, yes, I'm looking for an issue tracking tool rather than we're building a work platform, blah, blah, blah, where people would say, I'm not looking for a work platform, I'm looking for an issue tracker.

**Karri Saarinen** (3:49)
Yeah, and I think it's the way to think about it. It's like you're trying to maybe filter out people. You should be very specific initially. And maybe like try to like, you can talk to investors in very ambitious ways. You can say like, yeah, this is going to be the work platform of the future. But like on the website, you can just put like, this is a chat app. And like, this is a nice chat app. And like, just do that.