A SaaS product design podcast for non-designers. The Love At First Try Podcast explores how SaaS products become unforgettable.
We unpack the idea of taste in product and brand design, deconstruct what makes beautiful products beautiful, and show how to merge growth with delight.
If you’re a SaaS founder, CEO, or developer building products people love, this is for you.
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Clicks whisper, prompts yell: the future of SaaS UX | Mickey Alon (Foldspace AI)
Episode 20
Friday, July 17, 2026 • Duration 01:09:24
This episode's guest is Mickey Alon, co-founder and CEO of Foldspace AI. Mickey has spent 20+ years building products people actually use: he founded Insightera (acquired by Marketo), created Gainsight PX and co-authored the first book on product-led growth. Now he's betting that AI agents will completely change how we interact with software - and he has real usage data to back it up. If you're building a SaaS product and wondering what AI means for your UX, analytics and roadmap, this one is full of real numbers and hard-won lessons.
🧠 Chapters:
0:00 - Mickey's story: two exits and why he founded Foldspace AI
6:02 - Why AI agents should amplify customer success instead of replacing it
8:32 - Clicks whisper, prompts yell: tapping into user intent for the first time
11:14 - Why agentic interfaces make product experiments dramatically easier
11:50 - What's broken with product analytics and how intent data fixes it
14:35 - Implicit vs explicit usage and why adoption is the best cure for churn
17:52 - The Salesforce lesson: why UI revamps end up lipstick on a pig
20:42 - How agents rewrite the PLG playbook by eliminating friction completely
22:58 - Why headless SaaS is a myth and visual responses beat text
29:07 - Why "generate with AI" buttons are designed to fail
31:55 - MCP is a new name for API and your UI is context you get for free
36:44 - The new AI-native stack: deterministic backend, agent loop, agentic interface
42:01 - Building user trust with human-in-the-loop before risky changes
45:08 - The 70/30 finding: users ask the agent to act, not to answer
48:51 - Speed of outcome: why your first prompt should deliver 80% of the result
52:45 - Reviewing AI-written code and testing agents with LLM as a judge
1:00:00 - Mickey's favorite tools: Claude Code and the agentic CRM his team built
1:07:51 - Prompts are the new clicks and the 3-second rule for AI speed
💡 Actionable takeaways from Mickey
- Mine your agent's chat logs for intent, not just clicks. Users literally tell the agent what they're trying to achieve, so you finally get demand, sentiment and problem descriptions in their own words - insight click tracking can never give you.
- Think twice before your next UI revamp. Mickey watched Salesforce spend over a year on one: new users said it looked nicer, existing users hated relearning everything, and the complexity stayed. Ask first whether an agentic layer solves the actual problem faster.
- Never ship a bare "generate with AI" button. Without context it's like hitting "I'm feeling lucky" on Google. Embed the agent inside the product where it knows the page, the data and the user's settings for free - that context is what makes it succeed.
- Show visual responses, not walls of text. In Foldspace's measurements, visual answers get dramatically more engagement than text because we read a KPI trend in milliseconds. Worth it because engagement is what keeps users coming back to the agent.
- Add human-in-the-loop confirmation before any create, update or delete. Showing "here's what I'm gonna do" before applying protects users from missing context, and trust is the whole game: lose it once or twice and users are gone.
- Keep agent responses under 3 seconds. Foldspace sees users disengage beyond that, so speed is a UX feature, not an infra detail.
- Track prompts-to-outcome as a KPI. Mickey's bet: prompts will replace clicks as the core UX metric, so start measuring it now.
- Test your agents with scores and LLM-as-a-judge, not pass/fail. AI is non-deterministic, so measure whether behavior is getting better or worse in percentages - it's how Mickey's team ships fast without losing control.
Why your growth is stalling and what to actually do about it (w/ Asia Orangio)
Episode 19
Friday, June 5, 2026 • Duration 01:09:50
Most SaaS founders assume a growth plateau means something is broken with the product or the marketing. Asia Orangio has spent eight years helping over a hundred SaaS companies figure out what is the actual reasons for stalls in growth.
Asia is the founder of DemandMaven, a growth consulting firm focused on bootstrapped SaaS companies. Her whole approach to growth is holistic, looking at team structure, retention, segmentation, and product together, not one layer at a time.
In this conversation we get into why growth stalls at predictable moments, why NRR is the metric that actually tells you what's going on, and how to figure out which customer segment is worth doubling down on.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - Why acquisition is the least efficient growth lever and what to focus on instead 1:41 - How Asia began work in holistic growth consulting and why the shift happened 6:24 - The three ARR milestones where SaaS growth most commonly stalls 7:22 - How Asia diagnoses a growth plateau using pirate metrics, team structure, and processes 8:39 - Why the founder is almost always the bottleneck at a million ARR 10:06 - Why NRR is the most important metric and what below 80% actually means for your growth 14:31 - What team structure looks like at a million ARR versus three to five million 16:17 - Why the founder being the bottleneck is a structural problem, not a personal one 21:59 - The time tracking company stuck at four million and why their flat org made it nearly impossible to grow 24:20 - The clinic management company with four senior marketers and no one actually leading marketing 35:57 - Why 12-month churn is scarier than monthly churn and why it should keep you up at night 39:23 - How to decide which customer segment to focus on when you have competing options 43:12 - The clinic management case study where one segment had three times the NRR of everyone else 47:45 - How Ben Chestnut built NRR cohort reports by hand at Mailchimp to find his best customers 53:00 - Why not everyone on your team is wired to seek out and use new information1:02:37 - Why Asia is obsessed with Granola and how she uses it with Claude to query her meetings1:05:02 - The Mangomint activation experience and what it teaches about building for your actual audience
Building an AI-powered team & why narrowing our ICP doubled our win rate (w/ Guido Schmitz)
Episode 18
Thursday, June 4, 2026 • Duration 01:22:49
A lot of SaaS teams are adding AI to their stack and hoping it shows up in output. This episode is about what it actually looks like when you build the whole workflow around it and why the thinking behind it matters as much as the tooling.
Guido Schmitz is the CTO and co-founder of OneTeam, a mobile platform that helps hospitality and retail companies connect, engage, and develop their frontline workforce. They've been building for 11 years and are shipping faster than ever without growing headcount to do it. In this conversation, we get into how they use AI across every department, how they think about product quality and delight in B2B software, and what actually happened when they stopped selling features and started selling outcomes.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - What Love at First Try is about and who it's for 0:55 - How Guido started OneTeam at 19 and what problem they were solving 5:24 - Who OneTeam is built for and why the ICP is so specific 10:30 - What the employee experience looks like before OneTeam, and why onboarding matters more than most companies think 17:10 - The €3,000 cost of losing an employee and why reducing turnover by 1–2% pays for the tool many times over 19:23 - The aha moment for new employees: introducing yourself before your first shift and getting welcomed by colleagues 21:57 - How OneTeam thinks about empty states, animations, and the small details that make B2B software feel less like a chore 25:30 - The growth challenge that comes with building a multi-product platform and how messaging for a broad product is genuinely hard 26:11 - How going from feature selling to outcome selling and narrowing the ICP doubled their win rate 34:32 - The SaaS apocalypse debate and why vibe coding your way out of a $100/month subscription usually doesn't make financial sense 40:55 - How OneTeam adopted Cursor two years ago and why they're seeing roughly 7x the code volume per developer 42:16 - How Guido uses Lovable to prototype feature improvements and get real customer feedback in two to three days 44:26 - The agentic workforce running in Slack: a marketing agent, product agent, engineering agent, analyst, and sales ops agent — and what each one actually does46:23 - The error-monitoring agent that researches bugs, proposes fixes, runs tests, and opens pull requests for developer review47:22 - The competitor intelligence report that lands every Monday morning — and why it would have taken five or more people before1:01:34 - The mental model behind it all: ask what you'd do with 10x the team, then figure out if you can do it agentically1:05:34 - How AI is changing the design process, and why the idea is now the constraint — not the execution
Taste, quality and what it actually takes to build software people love (w/ Bob Baxley)
Episode 17
Friday, May 29, 2026 • Duration 01:33:29
A lot of SaaS products ship fast and skip the thinking. This episode is about what happens when you don't, and why that actually matters for growth.
Bob Baxley spent 35 years designing software at Apple, Yahoo, Pinterest, and ThoughtSpot. Products he worked on have been used by hundreds of millions of people. He's one of those people who has spent a long time thinking carefully about what makes software genuinely good, not just functional, and why so few companies get there.
In this conversation, we get into how to build a culture where quality is the standard, how to get your whole company to care about design without a single presentation, and how the decisions you make at the conceptual level shape everything downstream.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - Why the tech industry is in a speed race and what that means for product quality
7:37 - How Bob fell in love with computing at 11 years old and why that shaped everything after
12:31 - Why timing matters as much as talent when it comes to what you can build
13:58 - How economic pressure from VCs is changing the pace of design work inside companies
24:36 - The real difference between sales-led and product-led companies, and why it never changes after founding
27:05 - Why design teams have hurt themselves by hiding their process from the rest of the company
30:00 - How Bob's team ran an internal influence campaign at ThoughtSpot using weekly Loom videos
Positioning is a decision, not a tagline & the truth behind the AI hype (w/ Anthony Pierri)
Episode 17
Saturday, May 23, 2026 • Duration 59:14
If you're a SaaS founder who keeps rewriting your homepage and it still doesn't feel right, this episode is for you.
Anthony Pierri is the co-founder of Fletch PMM. He and his team have run their 2-week positioning sprint around 500 times for B2B software companies, which probably makes them the most experienced positioning consultancy out there. He's also one of the clearest, least jargon-filled voices on LinkedIn when it comes to marketing.
We spent an hour going deep on what positioning actually is (and isn't), why so many founders are stuck running five go-to-market motions at once without realizing it, and what happens when you make a real repositioning bet — with stories from Klaviyo, Anthropic, a trucking analytics company, and even Taylor Swift.
We also got into AI — specifically, what Anthony discovered when he stopped using chatbots and went deep into Claude Code. His take is the most grounded I've heard in months.
No fluff. No frameworks for the sake of frameworks. Just one of the sharpest operators in B2B marketing talking shop.
💡 Steal these quick wins from Anthony
1. Test your positioning by putting it on the homepage
Not a Google Drive deck. Not a Notion page. The homepage. It's the one asset everyone in the company has to live with publicly, which is exactly why agreement on it sticks. If your team can't agree on what should go on the homepage, you don't have a positioning problem — you have an unresolved strategic decision.
2. Stop defining your target market by firmographics
Company size, headcount, geo — none of these signals tell you whether a company actually needs your product. If you're trying to win five use cases inside one customer segment, you're running five different go-to-market motions in parallel. Pick the one that ladders into the biggest opportunity and lead with it.
3. Don't validate a reposition by asking your best customers
They came to you for the old story. They'll tell you not to change. Customer research is one input — not the only one. The bet sometimes requires alienating who you have to win who you want.
Designing for delight, reducing design debt & using AI to prototype faster (w/ Alicja Suska)
Episode 16
Thursday, May 7, 2026 • Duration 01:17:23
Alicja Suska has been designing SaaS products for 10 years.
She's worked at Toggle, Sourcegraph, and now leads product design at Buffer. What caught my attention: she comes from an artistic background — illustration and animation.
That shapes how she designs. Colors, composition, how elements work together — it comes more intuitively. But she admits the process is harder to explain: "I can reason why something is good, but I work more intuitively."
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - Jim's intro 0:25 - Who is Alicja and her journey through Toggle, Sourcegraph, and Buffer 3:00 - Designing for vastly different users: solo creators vs enterprise teams 5:24 - How to define taste as a designer (and why delight is more practical) 9:44 - Why delight only works after you've solved the core problem 10:26 - How an artistic background shapes product design thinking 15:33 - Sketching and showing rough work early (not polished mockups) 17:45 - Using AI in the design process: what works and what doesn't 21:30 - Prototyping Buffer Insights with Claude: 40+ concepts in one project 29:24 - The shiny object syndrome: wasting time on overhyped AI tools 31:41 - Designing AI features without screaming "this is AI" 39:15 - Enterprise vs consumer: when to be transparent about AI usage 40:04 - Onboarding philosophy: get users into the product as soon as possible 43:12 - Buffer's experiment: showing the UI before asking users to connect channels 46:18 - Credit card upfront vs free trial: what the data actually showed 49:18 - Time to value: identifying the real aha moment (it might not be what you think) 52:09 - Design debt: how navigation bloat quietly kills your product 55:01 - Why you need a dedicated designer who owns the product long-term 58:57 - Process hack: weekly time-to-value brainstorming sessions 1:04:38 - "Release what you're proud of" — Buffer's shift away from shipping fast 1:08:46 - Alicja's favorite products right now and why
Why great brands are stolen, not created — and how to find your visual direction w/ Zach Stevens
Episode 14
Thursday, April 9, 2026 • Duration 01:08:03
This is Love at First Try — a podcast for SaaS founders and developers who care about design but aren't designers themselves.
Zach Stevens is one of the co-founders of Conversion Factory, a marketing agency that works with growth-stage software companies. He runs their design team and has spent years helping SaaS brands go from scrappy to polished — without losing what makes them unique.
I wanted to talk to Zach because he's a growth-focused designer. He doesn't just make things look good — he thinks about how design serves the business. And in this episode, we get into how to define your brand's vibe, why stealing from the right references matters, and how to make sure your design supports your marketing instead of fighting against it.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode: 0:00 - Intro 0:25 - Who Zach is and what Conversion Factory does for SaaS companies 1:00 - Zach's origin story: from almost joining the Marines to meeting mentors who shaped Amazon's brand strategy 4:45 - The difference between a designer who just makes things pretty and one who solves business problems 7:15 - Aphantasia: why some people can't visualize ideas and what it means for design 11:50 - How Zach defines taste as a designer 13:58 - The Gap by Ira Glass: why your taste develops faster than your skills 17:27 - Why great brands are stolen, not created — and how Liquid Death proves it 21:20 - How AI changes the role of creative direction (you don't need to draw it yourself anymore) 23:40 - When beautiful design hurts conversions: the Adeline website breakdown 30:06 - The fine line between design that serves marketing and design that's just art 34:35 - How to add humanity to SaaS websites without looking like a stock photo catalog 38:43 - Why the emotion you want to convey matters more than how technical your audience is 43:12 - The branding spectrum exercise: masculine vs feminine, luxury vs affordable, subtle vs expressive 47:09 - Brands on fire vs brands on ice: how to stay creative without losing consistency 50:43 - Why typography alone can completely shift your brand's vibe53:53 - The Mentor Cruise rebrand: from utilitarian to premium using vintage Porsche ads as inspiration1:00:04 - How much should founder taste influence brand direction?1:04:04 - Zach's favorite products right now: Cora, Mile IQ, and ChatGPT for thinking out loud
Why tactical playbooks fail & the money moments framework w/ Marc Thomas
Episode 15
Thursday, April 2, 2026 • Duration 55:18
Marc Thomas wrote an annual upgrade email for Senja that listed 10 stupid products you could buy with the $58 you'd save.
A scarf shaped like a receipt. Random Amazon finds.
People took screenshots and shared it on Twitter and LinkedIn.
That's the kind of marketing brain I wanted on the podcast.
Marc's path: magazine journalist → SaaS founder (live polling tool) → Head of Growth at Powered by Search (working with $10-100M ARR clients) → Growth at Podia → now independent lifecycle marketing consultant.
What I appreciate about him: he doesn't look or feel like a typical marketeer. More playful, more artistic. He understands the fundamentals but puts a creative twist on everything.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - Intro 1:01 - Marc's journey from journalism to SaaS marketing 9:51 - Why tactical playbooks are dead by the time you hear them 15:25 - The Senja annual upgrade email that went viral 19:27 - How Podia found undervalued influencers in their own user base 26:07 - How Marc defines taste (and the Tony Wilson / Factory Records story) 31:00 - Habits for developing your creative taste 34:47 - Why filtering yourself kills your best ideas 37:49 - The "money moments" framework for lifecycle marketing 40:13 - How Podia restructured onboarding based on actual buying behavior 44:29 - Why you're probably not sending enough email (and the data to prove it) 47:31 - How many emails to send in an onboarding sequence 50:54 - The key emails every trial sequence needs 54:09 - Marc's favorite tools: Sunsama, Whisper Flow, Manus
💡 Steal these quick wins from Marc:
1. Separate strategic from tactical playbooks. Strategic = "emails help because people live in their inbox." Tactical = "do this exact LinkedIn ad format." Strategic playbooks stay valuable. Tactical ones are saturated by the time you hear about them.
12: How to build an experimentation culture (even with low traffic) w/ Lucia Van Den Brink
Episode 14
Thursday, March 26, 2026 • Duration 51:44
Lucia Van Den Brink has run nearly 1,000 experiments in 14 years.
She's worked with 100M+ brands, founded The Initial to help companies build experimentation in-house, co-founded Women in Experimentation, and teaches at CXL.
I invited her on Love at First Try to talk about something most SaaS teams get wrong: how to actually make data-driven decisions without overcomplicating it.
This episode is for you if you've ever thought "we don't have enough traffic to test" or "A/B testing is too expensive for us." Lucia challenges both of those assumptions.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - Intro: what this podcast is about and who it's for 0:25 - Who is Lucia and why experimentation matters for smaller SaaS teams 2:59 - The real difference between random testing and building an experimentation culture 6:36 - Why experimentation is actually about scaling leadership (insight from Booking.com) 9:15 - What counts as an "experiment" beyond simple A/B tests 11:32 - How a news website validated a 6-month feature before building it 12:57 - Why starting with removing elements is one of the biggest growth levers 16:22 - How to validate your data before trusting any experiment 19:05 - How to prioritize what to test (and where to start) 21:34 - Why you shouldn't segment your tests when you're just starting 25:41 - How to measure the right KPIs (including delayed metrics) 31:28 - Why you should never measure just one metric 36:45 - Real example: reducing churn in the first two weeks with a get started page 43:10 - Why "obvious UX improvements" still need testing (the humbling 20-30% win rate) 48:09 - The biggest mindset shift from junior to senior in experimentation
💡 Actionable insights from Lucia:
1. Start by removing, not adding One of the biggest growth levers is removing elements from your pages. Most tools let you hide elements without code. Try removing a field, a section, or a step in your funnel. You'd be surprised how often less friction means more conversions.
Designing AI video tools you can't prototype in Figma (w/ Lewis Dingley)
Episode 11
Thursday, March 5, 2026 • Duration 01:17:33
Lewis Dingley spent years at Renault, Sky, and Dyson building his CV with big names. Then he realized: he was one designer among 50. No ownership. No real impact. So he jumped into startups — and now he's designing AI-powered video tools at VEED.io that you literally cannot prototype in Figma.
What this episode is about
This is Love At First Try — a podcast about building SaaS products people actually love.
I sat down with Lewis Dingley, Senior Product Designer at VEED.io — the AI-powered video editor that's making video creation accessible to everyone.
Lewis has a wild background. Design school in France. Vehicle dashboards at Renault. TV products at Sky. Physical products at Dyson. And now — AI video tools at VEED.
What made me want to talk to him: VEED is building generative AI features you simply cannot design in Figma. Text-to-video. AI avatars. Image-to-video editing. Real AI models doing real things.
So how do you design for that? Lewis vibe codes. He prototypes with real APIs. He rebuilt an entire product in a day using Google AI Studio.
If you're designing AI-powered products (or thinking about it), this one's for you.
🧠 What you'll learn in this episode:
0:00 - Lewis's journey from French design school to Renault, Sky, Dyson, and VEED 5:22 - Why he left big corporations for startups and what changed 10:45 - Why product designers need to be closer to leadership 15:26 - Vibe coding: how Lewis rebuilt VEED's text-to-video product in one day 18:13 - Google AI Studio vs Lovable — which is actually useful for prototyping 21:04 - Why you should always present prototypes, never static screens 26:44 - The trick to making AI tools understand your design system 29:15 - How VEED's AI Playground integrates 30+ image and video models 34:00 - Why Kling's new model made months of their work obsolete overnight 36:29 - The biggest barrier for users is starting from scratch44:01 - VEED's AI agent that nobody used and what it taught them50:18 - Why education can't keep up with AI and what that means for designers55:07 - Short-form video addiction and why Lewis uses Do Not Disturb mode1:00:10 - Why some industries will never adopt new tech and that's okay1:08:27 - How Lewis defines taste as a designer1:12:25 - How he develops his taste with Mobbin, competitors, and adding his own ingredients1:14:12 - His least favorite SaaS (Slack) and why he pitched them a podcast feature
💡 Actionable takeaways from Asia
Steal these quick wins:
1. Pull your NRR report right now and look at it by segment
If you have ProfitWell, you already have an NRR chart. Asia's suggestion is to go look at it today, not next quarter. The number you're looking for is 12-month net revenue retention by customer cohort. If it's below 80% for your primary segment, that's the thing to fix before anything else.
2. Run a cohort analysis to find your best customer, not your most common one
Ben Chestnut used to build NRR cohort reports by hand at Mailchimp, flipping through different customer attributes until he found which segments had the strongest retention. That process told him who to focus the whole company on. Asia recommends doing the same: look at which segments have the best NRR, whether the team actually likes working with those customers, and whether you have a compelling enough story to attract more of them.
3. Treat a growth plateau as a diagnostic problem, not an execution problem
When Asia comes into a new engagement, the first thing she does is look at baseline pirate metrics, team structure, and how the team operates. The instinct for most founders is to push harder on marketing or ship more features. What she usually finds instead is that either the founder is the bottleneck, the team isn't structured to own the work, or the company is building for the wrong segment. Knowing which of those is true changes everything about what you do next.
4. Don't restructure your roadmap until you know which segment actually stays
Asia's story about the clinic management company is worth sitting with. Ninety percent of their customers were solo practitioners, but when she ran the retention analysis, the segment with staff had three times the NRR. Before you decide who to build for, pull the retention numbers by segment. The answer is usually already there.
5. Look at your 12-month churn number, not just your monthly one
Asia is direct about this: your monthly churn number might look fine while your 12-month churn is quietly killing growth. The customers who leave at month eight, ten, and twelve are the ones who tried to make the product work and couldn't. That churn shows up in NRR and it compounds. She recommends making 12-month retention a standing metric you review regularly, not something you check when growth slows down.
💡 Actionable takeaways from Guido
Steal these quick wins:
1. Start your agentic setup with one scoped job, not a big rollout
A good entry point is a single, specific job like a competitor intelligence report that runs every Monday morning. Define what the agent should look at, what it should extract, and where it should drop the output. Build confidence there before you add more.
2. Give new employees a social introduction before their first shift
OneTeam built a feature where new hires introduce themselves on the company's social timeline before they even start, and colleagues respond with a high five or a welcome message. It's one of the strongest early signals of belonging you can create, and it costs almost nothing.
3. Narrow your ICP before you touch your messaging
If your win rates feel stuck, the problem might not be how you're describing your product. It might be who you're describing it to. OneTeam went from "any company with non-desk employees" to a very specific type of hospitality brand. The messaging got sharper because the audience got sharper.
4. Flip the question when thinking about AI and headcount
Instead of asking "what can AI help us with?", ask "what would we do if we had 10x the team?" Then figure out which of those things can be done agentically. OneTeam is processing thousands of prospects a week with an agent that would have needed five or more SDRs before. The constraint isn't capability. It's imagination.
35:49 - What a head of design actually does on a sales call and why it worked
37:42 - Design tenets vs. design principles, and which one actually helps teams make decisions
42:30 - What choreography over control looks like in practice for a design leader
47:51 - The difference between micromanagement and being in the details, and why it matters
54:55 - How to think about quality within constraints instead of chasing world class as a target
1:00:46 - Why taste is hard to compete on, and which layer of the market you actually need to nail first
1:01:15 - A simple exercise to raise the taste level of your engineering team
1:06:08 - The three stages every market goes through before design becomes a competitive advantage
1:12:36 - What it really means to design for the person on the other side of the glass
1:16:57 - Why user research needs to be a ritual, not a one-time sprint
1:20:44 - The Post-it note observation that turned into a multi-billion dollar company
1:24:29 - Bob's favorite apps and what they got right at the conceptual model level
💡 Actionable takeaways from Bob
Steal these quick wins:
1. Run the "three favorite apps" exercise with your team
Ask everyone to name their three favorite apps .Not the ones they use most, their actual favorites. Getting your team to sit with that question starts a real conversation about what quality actually means versus what just has good distribution.
2. Show the work before it's done
Bob's team at ThoughtSpot made a 22-minute Loom video every week for 35 weeks, showing projects at every stage and sent it to the whole company. It shifted how every department understood and valued design work, without a single big presentation or formal pitch. If your team feels invisible inside the company, this is a low-cost way to change that.
3. Replace your design principles with tenets
Principles like "be clear" or "feel responsive" don't help anyone make a decision because nobody argues the opposite. A tenet is a hard-edged statement your team agrees on once so they stop relitigating the same debate.
4. Go watch your users outside the context of your product
When Bob was asked about ZenMaid, his recommendation was to visit cleaning business owners and understand how they think and run their business, not just how they use the software. Watching how someone actually works, before you introduce your product into the conversation, gives you better ideas than any feature interview.
5. Ask an LLM you've been using regularly: "What outdated mindset am I holding onto that's no longer serving me?"
The answer Bob got shifted how he thought about control and leadership. His suggestion is to run it with an LLM that has enough context on you to give a real answer, not a generic one.
4. Stop treating chatbot output as real work
Anthony's experiment: dropping 20 sales call transcripts into a chatbot got him a summary in 10 seconds. Looked great. Then he wrote a detailed instruction file for the AI on exactly how to summarize one call — took 2 hours to build, 5 minutes to run on a single call. The realization: the fast chatbot version was producing something that looked plausible without doing the work. If you're using AI for anything where accuracy matters, the painstaking version is the real version.
5. Build for where the AI is going to actually be useful: smarter automation
Don't build your strategy around AI replacing your team. Build it around AI replacing the slow, manual workflows that already exist (the stuff you'd otherwise build in Zapier or hire a junior to do). That's where the real productivity lives today.
💡 Steal these quick wins from Alicja:
Show the product UI before asking for commitment. Buffer stopped blocking users with "connect your channel" upfront. Now they show the calendar first. Users explore, then connect when ready. Less friction, more trust.
Design your empty states like onboarding screens. Most users skip onboarding anyway. They land on an empty screen that wasn't designed for being empty. Make your empty states guide users to the next action — not just fill space.
Run a monthly "time to value" session. Alicja blocks 1-2 hours monthly to brainstorm: how can we shorten time to value? No big project commitment. Just one brainstorm + one small dev task. Fixes pile up over time.
Use Claude to prototype before devs write code. Alicja brainstormed 40+ feature concepts with Claude, then had it generate interactive HTML prototypes using Buffer's design system. The team could experience features before any code was written.
Audit your navigation every time you add a feature. The default pattern is "add another tab at the top." Eventually you run out of space and unimportant things sit at the same level as critical ones. Review navigation with every addition.
💡 Actionable takeaways from Zach Steal these quick wins:
Define the feeling before the visuals. Before picking colors or fonts, ask: "How do I want people to feel when they interact with my brand?" Everything else follows from that answer.
Use the branding spectrum exercise. Map where your brand sits on spectrums like masculine vs feminine, luxury vs affordable, subtle vs expressive. It helps you spot mismatches before you start designing.
Steal from what makes you feel the way you want others to feel. Zach's team pulled from vintage Porsche ads for Mentor Cruise because Dominic wanted that timeless, premium vibe. Find your reference points outside your industry.
Design should serve marketing, not lead it. If your website looks amazing but the message gets buried, you've prioritized aesthetics over conversions. Copy first, then design around it.
Add humanity carefully. Photos of people can make your SaaS feel more relatable — but only if the vibe matches. A playful brand like PostHog uses pixel art hedgehogs instead of faces. Match the emotion, not the tactic.
Typography sets the tone. The same sentence in a geometric sans-serif feels modern and clean. In a serif with thick-to-thin contrast, it feels wise and nostalgic. Pick fonts that match your intended feeling.
Stay between fire and ice. "Brands on fire" are chaotic — nothing matches. "Brands on ice" are boring and rigid. The best brands have consistency with room for spontaneity depending on context.
2. Find your money moments. Any moment where someone could give you money or take it away deserves a dedicated email sequence. Not just onboarding and win-back.
3. Send pricing early. Don't wait. Day 2 or 3 of your trial, send an email explaining your plans and who each one is for. People don't look at your pricing page as much as you think.
4. Send more email than feels comfortable. At Podia, they went from 4 emails/month to 12. Result: 12% bump in paid conversions on email days, with a trailing effect for days after. Another client saw 60% revenue increase on email days.
5. Front-load your onboarding. Day 1 and 2 are the most important. Marc sends 2-3 emails on day 1 alone for some clients. Then taper off: daily for week 1, then less frequent through day 30.
6. Make your emails worth sharing. The Senja email worked because it was useful AND entertaining. Brand win + referral win in one.
2. Run an AA test before any real experiment Before you trust your data, run an empty test (control vs. control). This tells you if your tracking actually works. Skip this and you might be making decisions on broken data.
3. Measure multiple KPIs, not just one Pick a main metric, but always track 2-3 supporting metrics. If you're testing onboarding changes, measure signups AND activation AND delayed metrics like paid conversions. One number never tells the full story.
4. Consider negative testing Instead of building a big new feature to test, try removing the opposite. Want to know if onboarding calls help? Test what happens when you remove them. You learn faster and cheaper.
5. Calculate the business case for "losing" metrics Sometimes a test hurts one metric but helps another. If showing a phone number increases support calls but also increases conversions, do the math. The revenue might cover the cost.
💡 Actionable takeaways from Lewis
→ Prototype, don't design static screens. Present interactive prototypes to leadership instead of static Figma screens. Lewis says it's the difference between getting a "maybe" and getting a "wow, yes." Seeing is believing — especially when you're trying to get buy-in for new ideas.
→ Start with functionality, then UI when vibe coding. When using AI tools like Google AI Studio to prototype, build the working functionality first. Don't try to make it look pretty from the start — the AI gets confused and loses the functionality. Get it working, then refine the visuals.
→ Describe your design system in words, not just screenshots. AI tools are bad at replicating your UI from a screenshot alone. Instead, describe your design system: "minimalist design, these kinds of buttons, this iconography style." Once the AI understands the theme, it can generate consistent UI without constant screenshots.
→ Give users presets, not blank canvases. The biggest barrier for users is starting from scratch. Instead of asking them to write prompts or create from nothing, give them templates, presets, and examples they can tweak. Lewis saw this work at VEED — users don't want to type "sunrise lighting," they want to click a visual example.
→ Use Do Not Disturb mode aggressively. Lewis realized he was addicted to his phone — checking it every 10 seconds for notifications he didn't need. Now he uses Do Not Disturb so he only checks his phone when he has time, not when it demands attention.
→ Look at competitors and make it better. Lewis's approach to developing taste: research direct and indirect competitors, see what they're doing, then add your own ingredients. Don't start from scratch — start from inspiration and build on it.
