Problem

I think most designers and creatives make bad founders, especially early in their careers when they don’t have much experience.

I believe this is worth discussing because when you see symptoms, the first step is to come to a diagnosis—to understand why something is happening and then work on a cure. This is an attempt to do just that.

Every day, we hear about young founders—right out of college—raising funds and building startups. These are usually engineers, and sometimes MBAs.

In design school, this question used to confuse me a lot. Every day, we worked on building concepts by studying what works in markets and in users’ minds. So why don’t we see designers taking these concepts to market and bringing them to life? What makes an engineer more prone to building a successful startup than a creative?

Visibility

We could say it’s because design is a relatively new field, and designers are only recently becoming more visible in their contributions to companies. This makes them less credible, harder to fund, and more difficult to gain trust. This only feels like one third of an explanation at best. For example, studies show that roughly 25% of IIT alumni launch startups within five years of graduation, compared to around 7% of NID alumni, highlighting a difference in entrepreneurial exposure and network.

Ability to build

A second reason could be that engineers are actually able to build their ideas. Their ideas may not be the most user-friendly or well-researched, but they can build things fast—things that work. They can then iterate from there, and those who iterate quickly, listen to customers, and implement some kind of design thinking while building products are the ones who succeed.

This feels like a more understandable reason for the lack of successful young creative founders. This was my belief in the summer of 2024. I thought that if I could just learn to build the ideas and concepts I designed, I would be on a level playing field with engineers. I was inspired by AI and the concept of vibe coding, thinking it could bring significant power to creatives.

So that summer, I started learning to code and build things (I’ve only grown this skill and slowly reduced my reliance on AI for it).

I began experimenting with building my own products. At the time, AI models were not as capable, and it took hours just to make a sidebar the way I wanted. I was extremely reliant on AI and did not fully understand the technologies I was using, which became a massive time sink.

The design process

Eventually, after building things that saw little traction, I realized there might be a third, less obvious reason why designers often struggle as founders: the design process itself.

To explain this, we can look at conventional startup wisdom:

1. Build fast, iterate fast.

2. Build a hacky version first

3. Get 100 people to love your product first, rather than 1,000 people to kind of like it.

4. Do things that don’t scale

These ideas almost completely contradict the standard design process. Designers are taught to be thoughtful about what they build, to consider every user and edge case, and to present polished, well-thought-out solutions with no loopholes.

Just think about a design jury, and you’ll know I’m right—a design jury is almost the antithesis of a startup jury.

I’m not saying the design process is wrong or useless. Engineers can get 100 people to love their product, but to get the next 1,000 to love it, you need a designer who understands their context and builds for them.

The problem is that when designers apply this mindset to their own ventures, they are very likely to get stuck in the building phase—or they might brute-force the design process, where it becomes a barrier rather than a lever.

Example

I’ve experienced this myself. Last year, a friend and I noticed an opportunity: house-help services were disorganized and messy, and we thought we could organize it via a quick-commerce service connecting users to help at their doorstep. We planned to launch it as a WhatsApp-operated service in Powai, where I was living, and see where it went.

The next step, however, was embarrassing and counterproductive. I was learning the R&D process at the time and insisted we study research papers and plan a full user research phase before building anything. I spoke to my house help, read papers, and started a FigJam. My friend, a communication designer, began working on branding and visuals.

The project slowly died. We had nothing real to show, and people did not care that we were conducting research.

A few months later, a service called Maestro launched in Powai—exactly the same concept, executed beautifully through a convenient WhatsApp experience, catering to the upscale neighborhood. They later rebranded as Snabbit and are doing extremely well.

Looking back, many of the decisions we made were clearly flawed, but the key takeaway is that, as designers, our usual design process became a barrier rather than an enabler when building something from start.

Ending note

The solution might be to develop a “founder design thinking”—a variation of the process better suited for designers who want to build, where design thinking acts as leverage rather than a barrier. I’m still exploring what this could look like.

The final note I want to leave is that there are many variations of the design process, and it’s critical to understand which is appropriate for which context. Mapping these processes will help identify which to tap into for different contexts.