How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

**Aaron Epstein** (0:00)
Great design can make or break your product. So to learn more about how to prioritize high quality design in the earliest stages of your startup, we're sitting down with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder and CEO of Linear. Karri worked at Coinbase, Airbnb, and built one of the best issue tracking tools on the market in Linear. And today, he's gonna share some of his advice for how you can design a product that truly stands out. Welcome to another episode of Design Review. Karri, thank you so much for joining us.

**Karri Saarinen** (0:36)
Well, it's awesome to be here.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:37)
Maybe just to kind of give people a sense of where Linear is at today. Maybe you can just kind of give us a high level of any interesting stats or facts, and maybe a quick description of what Linear is.

**Karri Saarinen** (0:49)
The idea with Linear is that we want to be this purpose-built platform for building products and planning of building products. It's not a suite of tools, but it's more like integrated workflows. It's a tool that engineers might use every day. So I think its design is especially important. And speed is very important, because if any kind of paper cut or bad experience, it will multiply a lot of times. Where we are now, like fast forward today, we have about 15,000 companies as customers. And then we have growth companies like Mercury, Ramp, Retool, Prex, and a lot of growth companies, as well as larger companies like OpenAI and Block, which is a financial company. We wanted to build, focus on the quality, and keep the focus really tight to build the best product we can for these customers. So that's why we've done some of the things differently.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:44)
You're also a YC founder. And I'm curious, kind of at all the stops of your career, from founding your first company, going to Coinbase as the first designer there, lead designer at Airbnb, and then starting your own company again at Linear, what's one lesson that you took away from each of those stops that's kind of made Linear what it is today?

**Karri Saarinen** (2:04)
I think Linear is very much built with the advice we got from YC and just make something people want and talk to the users and simplifying the startup building process or clarifying it that not a lot of these things matter that you see out there. And a lot of things can wait. What really matters is like you find those someone do you can build something for and you can build it in a good way. So I think YC really helped me to understand that building companies, it doesn't have to be, especially in the beginning, it doesn't have to be that complicated. You almost just need the singular focus of making progress, building something for the customers, and then all the other stuff can come automatically or later or something. So it can wait. I think YC also helped me with the ambition that you could see like, hey, you can make a lot of progress very fast time, and also eventually that progress will lead to a massive companies or a massive growth. So I think it was really important for me. Coinbase was actually in the same batch that I was saying, which was 2012 summer. Maybe what I learned there was that you kind of have to really clarify with the company, but also especially I think as a designer, what is the one or a couple of problems we are truly trying to solve with the design or with the company itself. And for me, that at Coinbase, thinking about back crypto back in 2014, it was a very different time. Like there's a very little trust in the market. And also just because it's a new thing, you don't have that trust built in. So like what I saw that my job as a designer is like, I have to change this company to look like more trustworthy and more professional, because they want to go mainstream, but we also need to simplify this. We have to make the design really simple and explain it in a simple way, so we can break out of this crypto niche group. I kind of looked around the website, the product, the brand, and I basically just made a list of like, these things needs to be fixed. So it's like the logo was this stack of coins, like a little bit like kind of like a Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge kind of like. Yeah, it's like the coins on the table, one of them is like tipping over. It's like, why is it tipping over? It's like, that's not, that doesn't feel good. It should feel like staple or something. I did have some trouble convincing them to like pick up a new logo mark. And eventually, yeah, we didn't do it until the IPO. They finally picked one, which is like a kind of like a circle that looks like a C. There's like a thing going into it. So it looks like a C. And then on the website, like what it looked like was, so Brian and the team had basically built it over the past two years. I think they had like quite a lot of users already. They had a lot of money in the background, like in the platform, but everything was built with Twitter, Bootstrap. I think that the product itself worked quite nicely. It was quite simple. The problem was that the visuals, using this kind of standard library, made it look like a hack project. So like someone coming to a website thinking, oh, should I buy some Bitcoin? And like, should I store my money in this Bitcoin bank? It's kind of like makes it a little bit uneasy. It's like, can I trust these people? Like, is this a real company? Is this some like side project? This is the hack project. So the second thing is like, well, we need to fix the website. Like we need to make some kind of visuals to it.