[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) - Launch your company wit...
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Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) - Launch your company without hiring a
designer
Hey HN! We're Alex and David, the founders of Parade
(https://getparade.com). Parade uses software to guide founders
through early branding decisions, including designing a basic logo,
selecting fonts, selecting colors, and defining their company's
overall aesthetic. A lot of early stage founders are incredible
engineers, but lack the ability to make things look "right". We've
seen a bunch of our friends launch products to no reception, some
of which seemed due to poor design decisions (like, making buttons
hard to find or a landing page that looks like it might steal your
credit card). Two years ago, two of my closest friends started a
company, raised a small round, and spent tens of thousands of
dollars on their initial branding. That was a substantial
percentage of their funding, and then their brand entirely changed
once they learned more about their customer. After I saw them waste
a ton of time and money on this, I realized that it ought to be
possible to build software that could have done just as good of a
job as the design agency. At the core of it, the designers asked my
friends a bunch of questions about how they want their company to
be perceived by customers, offered them colors and fonts and a
design aesthetic that conveyed those feelings, and then created a
mockup of a website that incorporated those elements. So, I decided
to build software to do just that. With Parade, we have taken a
traditional brand design interview and turned it into a self-serve
software product. You answer a series of questions about how you
want your brand to be perceived and receive design aesthetic
suggestions based on them. We use machine learning to identify
design elements (such as fonts, colors, layouts, use of color,
density of information, line and button styles, and visuals) that
project the way you want your brand to feel, then present them to
you as simple choices. To power the suggestions, we collected
training data from both designers and non-designers to understand
what emotional reactions these design elements evoke. Because of
this technology, we are able to identify the design aesthetics that
you want without having to iterate repeatedly or spend hours
searching for inspiration. After you make your choices, we use the
math behind design theory (such as an algorithm to expand one color
into a range of colors that accounts for the difference in
perceived contrast based on hue, saturation, and lightness) to
flesh out your brand [0]. Right now, after onboarding, you are
able to access all of your design elements in a style guide for
free through the dashboard. It includes your colors and your fonts,
plus a place to download your logo and icon in a few colors. You
can see an example of what this looks like here:
https://app.getparade.com/hackernews/style-guide or here:
https://app.getparade.com/hooli/style-guide. This is similar to the
output startups get from a first engagement with a designer, which
helps you set up basic, consistent styling for your website and
social media profiles. At this point, we've helped thousands of
companies create their brands, including YC-backed companies like
WellPrincipled (https://www.wellprincipled.com/), Enable
(https://www.enable.us/) and MeterFeeder
(https://www.meterfeeder.com/). The next step beyond style guides
would be to automatically generate brand assets--things like pitch
decks, landing pages, and social media posts. We're working on
that. We haven't completely automated it yet, but we are able to
create these assets with very rapid turnaround time. Once we get it
fully automated, we plan to add subscription features that enable
founders to make ready-to-use assets themselves. In the meantime,
we run an agency, serving customers using our work-in-progress
software. It's different from a traditional agency, though--while
traditional agencies spend many days asking you about how you want
your brand to look, seeking inspiration, and iterating based on
your feedback, we are able to capture what you describe through our
onboarding survey and create assets with your design elements
algorithmically. We are able to deliver most designs within 48
hours, and almost all of our customers have been satisfied without
any iteration. Right now, a lot of the algorithmic design work
happens via an in-house Figma plugin, which we plan to move onto
our platform in 2022 and open up to self-service. Something that's
surprised us while working on this: we've found that our users
don't always believe that their choices are really great. Design is
intimidating--you're aware that there is some psychology of color
and also some color theory rules, but aren't exactly sure what they
are. You've built things in the past that just didn't look quite
right--how can you be sure the choices you made on Parade are good?
Oftentimes, designers will even use words to make themselves seem
to know some secret you don't. We're trying to reassure our users
by surfacing more of the science behind the suggestions we make,
and to make sure we encode rules that prevent certain common
mistakes. We would love to hear your thoughts, questions,
concerns, or ideas about what we're building - or about your
experiences with automating design in general. We appreciate all
feedback and suggestions! [0] See
https://www.w3.org/TR/AERT/#color-contrast for math on color
contrast, or https://alienryderflex.com/hsp.html for a good writeup
on perceived brightness.
Author : alexray
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-11-29 16:58 UTC (6 hours ago)
| blowski wrote:
| I really struggle with design, so one of the main challenges I
| have launching any product is the UI.
|
| But I've been promised these things in the past, and wasted money
| on them. 99 Designs, Freelancer, ThemeForest (including asking
| the theme developer for customisations). I've tried them all, and
| they've never worked. So I approach this fairly sceptically.
|
| But I'd love to see it work.
|
| Usually the biggest problem is not the up-front design - there
| are some lovely ones out there. It's "how do I map this solution
| for this problem into a UI that makes sense?". And I can't
| imagine how you systematise that, but it would be amazing if you
| could.
| alexray wrote:
| Yeah, UI design is tricky. We haven't solved that yet, but
| would love to in the long run.
| gopher_space wrote:
| You're getting into "launch your house without hiring an
| architect" territory there. UI isn't so much tricky as it is
| an entirely separate discipline, devoted entirely to context,
| with a ton of thinking already done and ready to be applied
| at the individual level.
|
| Just having a few off-the-rack workflows that are easy to
| play with would be helpful.
| alexray wrote:
| Yeah, I think you're exactly right re:"just having a few
| off-the-rack workflows that are easy to play with would be
| helpful". There really seems to be standard conventions
| that would work for most workflows, kind of like what
| component galleries do for web design. I haven't explored
| where that idea may lead. We're a long way off from trying
| to tackle UI design, but it does seem interesting.
| narush wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Woo woo.
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks! Woo woo. :)
| devops000 wrote:
| Would be great to see a preview of Display ad or Landing page
| before purchasing for 800$. Is it human-made or generated by
| software?
| alexray wrote:
| Yeah, that's a great idea. We want to add previews soon. Right
| now, it's a human using our internal tools. We're making a lot
| of progress towards generating it with software, but aren't
| there yet.
| joshum97 wrote:
| Nit: to me at least, "Never deal with another freelancer" comes
| off as unnecessarily harsh (even if it resonates with some). I
| understand the product is targeted to early-stage startups
| without the budget to hire someone, but it sounds like it's
| putting down the idea of working with a designer altogether (see
| "no need to hire a designer"), when you could poise it as
| complementary to working with a designer eventually if we choose
| to do so.
| alexray wrote:
| Yeah, that's good feedback. We don't want to put down the idea
| of working with a designer later in your company. In fact, many
| of our users have grown their companies and hired designers to
| extend their brand into their application UI. We'll work on the
| phrasing.
| nojs wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! You are definitely addressing a real pain
| point here.
|
| I would love to see this combined with a tool that helps with
| choosing an available domain name. I've used heaps of these and
| never found one that does it well.
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah, names are TOUGH. You should see all of the names
| we decided not to use for Parade.
| d--b wrote:
| I am throwing this out here, and I don't mean to offend, but raw
| feedback may be useful to you: I think your own logo looks
| terrible. Both the pictogram and the font. And the favicon. The
| animation of the logo in the video is great though.
|
| Sorry, maybe I am the only one who thinks this, but it clearly
| has an impact on how I rate your expertise...
|
| Your customer's logos look nice though...
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. Our icon is a tiny Golden Spiral,
| which is one of the most common examples of the intersection
| between art and math. It's a little quirky, and it brings our
| team a lot of joy, so I like it a lot.
|
| P.S. there are a lot of good Golden Spiral/Golden Ratio memes
| [0] out there. If you have one that you like, feel free to
| share it with me [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-golden-
| ratio
| karaterobot wrote:
| "Launch your product without hiring a branding consultant" may be
| a more accurate way to describe this offering!
|
| I get that this is more about branding than product design. But,
| I'd like to point out that if you are making a product, someone
| is doing the design for that product, whether they realize it or
| not.
| alexray wrote:
| That's a good point. We want to figure out a way to help with
| UI design in the long run, but for now, we're focused on
| branding.
|
| P.S. Have you read Don Norman's _The Design of Everyday
| Things_? Your comment "someone is doing the design for that
| product, whether they realize it or not" reminded me of a lot
| of the examples in the book.
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Well this is amazing!
|
| This would be an amazing fit for my side projects that are a
| _little_ more serious than "do my own 30s design," but not
| nearly so serious (yet) as "find, manage, and pay a freelance
| designer".
|
| And it seems like a great business too. The upsell prices are a
| little hefty for side project, but if I build a project on this
| that gets a bit of traction, a few hundred bucks for a landing
| page / ui library / marketing email template starts to seem
| pretty attractive. Especially if it lets me put of "use a real
| designer" until a little further along in the product's
| lifecycle. :)
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks! I'm excited to hear that, and glad you think it's
| amazing! It sounds like Parade could be a great fit for your
| side projects :)
| JonathanBuchh wrote:
| I love how I instantly found fonts I love. It took me less than
| three minutes. Great product!
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks so much!
| awillen wrote:
| This is a really great idea, and I love the business model of
| selling future design work after you've already given your
| customer a bunch of value for free. I'd honestly consider having
| a pricing tab in the main menu that explains that - my one
| concern was that you'd have me fill out a whole questionnaire
| then try to charge me at the end before actually giving me the
| results.
| mottosso wrote:
| A lot of positives in the comments so far, I'll chime in with at
| least _one_ negative that I 'm not entirely confident with, but
| here goes.
|
| A startup's branding is an early indicator of a teams commitment
| and skill. Even with todays Bootstrap themes I sometimes get
| fooled into thinking a product or service has dedication behind
| it when it turns out to be a smoke screen to test the market for
| interest. This kind of service accelerates this effect; now the
| ones who do commit and carry the skill and experience to pull off
| a successful startup will be competing against - as was already
| mentioned in this thread - personal projects or founders with no
| regard or respect for branding. What if the tables were turned:
| "Got a great marketing team but no interest in features or
| solving a real problem? Our AI can fix that for you!". Should
| such a team succeed?
|
| I said I wasn't entirely confident about this, because I also
| realise this is what progress looks like and it is a natural step
| forwards in the direction we're headed. But is it a destination
| we want to reach?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| If the AI can build the product, that's great.
|
| Most small businesses need little design and little code to
| deliver value.
|
| This has a positive decentralising effect on the economy.
| Instead of having a single billion dollar company you'll have
| competing small companies.
|
| Reputation and testimonials will weed out bad actors or
| companies that can't deliver value, as they already do.
| lasryaric wrote:
| Your headline talks to me a lot.
|
| If you can deliver on your promise then I would definitely be a
| user and a customer.
|
| I am a software engineer and the design part is always a big
| problem for me, until a friend and ex-colleague of mine arrives.
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks! I'm excited to hear that. Give it a spin sometime and
| send feedback - the more feedback we get, the better our
| product will be :)
| artembugara wrote:
| I think you nailed a big problem. My co-founder and I were 2
| engineers when we started our bootstrapped venture. One thing I
| knew for sure: our "design taste" is awful.
|
| It took me one full day to find a website builder that would have
| pre-built options of design. I found Landen (now called Umso:
| https://www.umso.com/)
|
| Our website (https://newscatcherapi.com/) is still on Umso, and
| I'm happy with it.
|
| However, fonts, logo, mails, etc. I'd love to have it all
| together at the very beginning.
| alexray wrote:
| We're big fans of Umso too! Some of our users have created
| brand styles on Parade and built their website there.
| artembugara wrote:
| One thing to add for the first-time founders: Your customer
| problem understanding has to be great. Your product has to
| solve a problem. These things cannot be neglected.
|
| But, your design, logo, fonts can be awful, so do not spend
| time/money/efforts on that when you just begin. Use product
| like Parade and start solving a problem.
|
| No one will care about your design as long as you solve a
| problem, but NOT the other way round.
| alexray wrote:
| Yeah, this is definitely true. It's not worth much time or
| money on design early on. You just need something credible --
| sometimes we joke about the idea of "Minimum Viable Branding
| (MVB)", like an MVP. We think Parade gets you there.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| I tend to view design as a signal of legitimacy and
| competence. Whether it's a website, or a brick and mortar
| establishment, I will leave if it looks like no attention was
| given to the way things look.
| tixocloud wrote:
| Great advice. In addition, first-time founders should focus a
| lot on how the product addresses the customer problem and
| build no more than what is needed to solve that problem. I
| sometimes work with founders who have too much luxury with
| time and money (from their full-time job) that so much
| time/effort is wasted on building features that aren't
| necessary. That being said, the hard part is that it's an art
| and not exact science but there are frameworks you can use to
| minimize waste.
|
| We've built product without even having a website. Just cold
| outreach and talking about how we solve our customer's
| problems.
| swyx wrote:
| very cool! what can you disclose about plans for pricing
| model/revenue? first thing i look for in any startup that I'm
| about to try/evangelize. i see that "there's no subscription" in
| the FAQ - so you're like an asset marketplace?
|
| suggestion - dont make me signup just to try you out - see if you
| can bring out at least part of your process from behind your
| login wall.
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion. We'll try to find a way to bring
| more of our product outside of the login wall.
|
| Creating a brand and getting a style guide is free. We charge
| in the hundreds-of-dollars range for the agency side of our
| business.
| dano wrote:
| FYI, ublock origin blocks track.customer.io which is an alias for
| open.getparade.com and so the account verification step fails
| until ublock is disabled. I'd recommend moving to internal
| tracking rather than using customer.io, just my 2 cents of
| feedback.
| alexray wrote:
| Ah, thanks for pointing that out. We'll get this fixed.
| raywu wrote:
| Your set up reminds me of Plato (W16?). I would give Parade a
| try. PM/founder here.
| alexray wrote:
| Great! Glad to hear it.
| yeldarb wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Really enjoyed using an early version for
| a hackathon project earlier this year. Hugely valuable to
| automatically start from something that looks good as an engineer
| without having to put much thought into it.
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks! Glad Parade was valuable for you!
| easton wrote:
| This is really cool. I'm bad at making anything look good, so the
| more things like this the better.
|
| I noticed you had Google Slides support (presumably for making
| themes based on the generated brand kit). Any chance of that
| coming to PowerPoint too? Making PowerPoint themes by hand is the
| worst, so anything to alleviate that would be welcome.
| alexray wrote:
| Yep, that's very near term on our roadmap. Right now, you can
| download the Google Slides document that we make and have it
| work pretty well.
| mike_d wrote:
| Is the unicode line separator in "Never deal with another
| freelancer" a cheeky jab at freelancers or did you not test
| across devices?
|
| https://snipboard.io/kzcIhm.jpg
| alexray wrote:
| I'm not sure where they came from -- what browser/device are
| you using? We use Webflow for our marketing site, so I may need
| to go fix some settings in there.
|
| P.S. I wish I was cheeky enough to make that jab at freelancers
| ;)
| kareemm wrote:
| Your HN headline made me click instantly. I'm a technical founder
| and generally gotten by on a combination of Bootstrap templates,
| Logo creation services, and some tactical production design.
|
| I've used Looka in the past for our company Savio
| (https://www.savio.io). How are you different from them?
| alexray wrote:
| I'm glad you're interested -- based on how you described
| yourself, you're exactly the person we're building for.
|
| Looka is a great tool for creating a logo, and they're
| primarily focused on that -- and I've seen some great logos
| created on there.
|
| We're especially focused on creating the right design aesthetic
| for you. If you're building a fun consumer SAAS business, you
| might lose credibility if your website is super formal and
| unapproachable. Fonts, colors, information density, use of
| white space, use of imagery, and other design elements
| influence the way your brand is perceived. Parade makes
| recommendations across these dimensions, which should help you
| create the aesthetic you're going for.
| kyaghmour wrote:
| How does your ML get fed and what guarantees actual ownership of
| the generated output?
| alexray wrote:
| RE:ML - We pay designers and non-designers to describe a wide
| variety of marketing assets and use their output as the
| training data. It's a lot of work, but we try to compensate
| them well.
|
| RE:Ownership - you own what you create. We plan to have a law
| firm help us spell this out explicitly for us at some point in
| the near future.
| Cenk wrote:
| Looks very interesting, and definitely solves a problem. I wish
| there was a way to preview some sample designs without having to
| sign up - NewGlue from Stockholm does this quite well, I think:
| https://newglue.com
| alexray wrote:
| Yeah, that's something we want to improve. Thanks for sharing
| NewGlue - I like the way they do their example brand too.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I like this a lot, I went through it and generated some assets. I
| ran into a couple of issues though:
|
| - I don't trust myself picking colors, fonts, etc, and I'm
| worried that when I go to buy a UI template or whatever my
| terrible decision for colors won't be "fixed". I'd much rather
| pay you to go through this with me based on my inputs and trust
| your expertise.
|
| - For typography, do people really use custom typography? Not
| only does it add bloat to your bundles, it seems defaulting to
| the system UI provides a better UX?
|
| - For colors, I really want an entire palette for both light and
| dark mode. I don't see an option for dark mode at all, is this
| possible?
|
| - I was worried your pricing would be obscene since you can't get
| to it without going through the process, but it's actually very
| reasonable. I think you should let people know up front what the
| pricing is, don't be afraid of showing it.
|
| Great idea though!!
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks! Glad you like it.
|
| It's funny - we've heard the "I don't trust myself" sentiment
| often. We want to make you believe that your choices are great
| (and, most of the time, they are). We've thought about offering
| to have a designer take a glance at what you've chosen, but
| don't yet feel confident that it would solve the problem.
|
| And great point! We don't yet have a dark mode setting, but
| it's something we want to build.
| bobberkarl wrote:
| Alwx, this is a huge pain point . Is your tool generating a css
| file that i can reuse for the webapp itself?
| alexray wrote:
| We're not yet, but we've explored it a bit. It seems like a
| great idea. We want to figure out a good way to make it work
| with a lot of the common frontend toolkits.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Having used a few tools in this space I'm kind of jaded. I'm not
| sure what I was expecting but not this. WOW this works really
| great! Great work, very very well executed. I am definitely a
| customer
| alexray wrote:
| Thanks so much! I love hearing that :)
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