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- [00:00]
Steven Haney
The reason handoff isn't solved is because no one gets hired or fired based on handoff.
- [00:05]
Rid
I would imagine in order to take this leap, you probably had some core differences and ways that you wanted to innovate on that first design. Messy exploration bucket, having the ability to.
- [00:18]
Steven Haney
Do the like 80% of Photoshop in a tool that's like the central place that you're in, I think is really powerful and really interesting.
- [00:24]
Rid
That's the takeaway for me is like I understood conceptually that shaders were important, interesting, and something that really talented designers, designers that understood how to manipulate this kind of technology were using and that it was just locked in some GitHub file and I was never really going to be able to mess with it. All of a sudden I'm like, hey, I can do this.
- [00:43]
Steven Haney
It's speeding up design flows. It's not like skipping them. The designer's in control, the designer's steering and the AI is an assistant that helps them move faster.
- [00:51]
Rid
I'm encouraged to hear you say that because that is kind of the missing piece that I feel right now.
- [00:55]
Steven Haney
I think if you do want to code, go for it. I think it's awesome. You should definitely do it. Design, engineering, awesome. We need more design engineers. But if you are a traditional designer that doesn't want to learn to code, like, I think that is totally valid too. That rule for that designer is not going away.
- [01:07]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid and this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Steven Haney, who's the co founder of Paper, which is the new design tool that feels like everybody's talking about right now. So this episode is a behind the scenes of his vision and where he thinks the tooling landscape is headed next. And we talk about a high handoff, creativity and everything in between. But first I wanted to dive right into it and ask, why build a new design tool? Especially when it feels like all the startups that I see are jumping straight to code.
- [01:43]
Steven Haney
Right now everyone's really focused on engineering, design, engineering. If you listen to Twitter, everyone's going to become a design engineer. And I think at its core, I don't necessarily agree with that. I think that the role of design is maybe more important than it is in the past. I also think a lot of folks don't understand what a designer does with most of their time. They just see the kind of the end result. And I think that's the designer's job in reality. Like, I think calling a designer's job is A generalization, but a lot of it is like, what are my competitors doing? What does my boss want? What are my users saying? Let me try 10 different things really quickly so I can get a feel. Let me get my stakeholders in the room so they can see these mocks. And there's this whole. That, like, 85% of design upfront is more of that kind of stuff. And then at the end, you do tend to have something that's like, here's the decision point. And so I see the process of design as more like a driver of decisions, a facilitator of decisions. Yes, there's usually UI at the end. Yes, there's some engineering that happens after that, but that's not why designers have existed. You know, that's not why the role of design has existed. I think there's actually a huge opportunity. Everyone's really focused on, you know, how can we use LLMs to generate code and give more people more coding powers, which I think is really cool too. But no one's working on the role of design tasks, tools for the role of design. And so I just actually think there's a huge opportunity there to kind of be. It's a little bit of a contrarian take, I guess, but I think that role is actually going to become more important and more of a differentiator in the future.
- [03:06]
Rid
I don't know if you've read it. There's this article that David Huang wrote recently, and it was all about how strategy is compressing. And as you're talking, it's reminding me of it, where, yeah, like, UI is the output, but at the end of the day, a designer's job is to get the team aligned on this thing that we should build and what we should invest into. And.
- [03:27]
Steven Haney
100%, yeah.
- [03:28]
Rid
The idea is basically, as the world moves at the speed of AI, that actually becomes a lot more difficult and does require a dedicated role when everybody can create ten times more quickly. So it's. I can see some of the parallels here where it's like, yeah, we're really focused on the output, but what is the designer driving in an org, you know, 100%.
- [03:51]
Steven Haney
I mean, what's the result of a figma file? What's the result of a sketch file? I mean, yes, there is that handoff at the end, but, like, it's really like alignment. It's fleshing out the problems. It's figured out what the problems might be. All of that is insanely valuable. It's not going away. If anything, we need, as you're saying we need more of it and we need tools that allow you to move faster and be able to keep up as you have to drive more decisions across, across the team. The reason handoff isn't solved is because no one gets hired or fired based on handoff. The designer's job isn't to produce the finished code UI and the engineer's job isn't to figure out the design. And so you get hired or fired based on your job. And that middle part is just kind of this loose, messy thing. And the reason why it's been so hard, we can, you know, we worked on this for a while at Modules. The reason it's so hard to fix handoff is no one gets hired or fired for it, and so they're not willing to change what they're doing in order to make that bit better.
- [04:47]
Rid
Real quick message. And then we can jump back into it. So you've heard me rave about Jitter's new infinite canvas for animation, but don't forget they have a totally revamped Figma plugin to support it. You can import Figma slides in the Jitter Multi select layers and frames and also import your entire Figma file all at once. It's seriously never been easier to animate your designs, and Jitter has become my first choice anytime I need to add motion. So head to Dive Club Slash Jitter to create something amazing today. That's J I T T E R. Remember what Jonam Trivedi from Airbnb said about shaders?
- [05:23]
Steven Haney
They're like the final frontier in UI development, right? It's like the ultimate escape hatch that you are no longer limited by anything.
- [05:30]
Rid
That your framework or design system or software library gives you.
- [05:35]
Steven Haney
You're just given this canvas and it is fully up to you to figure out what to do with it.
- [05:39]
Rid
They used to be this alien format that I couldn't really do anything about, but now paper is making for designers anywhere to create their own shaders. You can preview them directly on the canvas and it's just another reason why I'm all in on Paper as the next great design tool. They are truly raising the ceiling for creativity and you can be one of the first to try it out. Just head to Dive Club Slash Paper. Okay, now on to the episode. We might come back to the handoff piece, but I do want to touch on Modules because for people listening who are not familiar, this is not your first rodeo. You've already made a play in the tooling space, so maybe you could share a bit of context for that. Experience and talk about how that has influenced the way that you're approaching paper this time around.
- [06:25]
Steven Haney
So I grew up probably as you did. Like I was like cracked version of Photoshop. You know, I had this, I had this software called Bryce. Did you ever use Bryce? It's like 3D modeling. It was made for landscapes, but you could, it had materials and you could do these abstract designs and I would take them and I'd do like really bad post magic in Photoshop and I would post them on DeviantArt. I don't know if you're familiar with DeviantArt. It was like the place, you know, the cool place when I was 14, forever ago. And if you got like 50 comments on DeviantArt, that was like you were at the peak of the Internet in those days. Right. And I just, I mean, I love that era though because everyone was just trying stuff. It was explore, exploration. Very creative at the time. I was also doing like engineering too and I didn't know which way I wanted to go with my career and I still don't. So I'm still figuring that out. I've been pulled more towards the engineering side, but there's always been that component of, of design. And sometimes I've been a full time designer, sometimes I've been a full time engineer. And it's so much fun to do both and find jobs where you can do both. I ended up through like E commerce. I was in this big corporate job in New York City, like leather shoes, like suit and tie to the office. I was an engineering manager and I was like corporate laddering. It wasn't for me at all. You know, I mean, gosh, I love New York City, but not the corporate life. So we decided to leave New York City and me and my girlfriend at the time and I saw this tweet of a person looking for a co founder and he was trying to get, he was trying to raise money and they kept being like, you need a co founder, you can't be a solo founder. And so he was looking for a co founder and he was in Ireland and I was moving to Seattle at the time. And we, we just decided to go for it. And this, this was modules. We said, let's give it six months, you know, see, we'll, we'll run a Kickstarter. Let's see what happens. And we ran a Kickstarter and this was like the, the mission was solving handoff. It was, it was helping designers handoff to, to developers without losing letter spacing and colors and the things that Engineers maybe don't see about design. And the Kickstarter did really well. We raised like 36, 000, you know, in the goal based on that, we raised a round, a VC round. And this was before we had ever met in person. So we were like, you know, raised a million dollars. We never met in person, Hired a great team, we got some amazing people coming on board, raised another round. And so at this point we started meeting up in London. It was like the central place we met up. So modules, a lot of people really like that mission. They love the mission of bridging the gap between design and development. While we weren't successful in solving it, we did make a Radix UI which is like the, you know, kind of like the default react component library now Powers Vercel and linear and shadcn, all these things. That was great. I mean that was, that was almost something we made for ourselves. And it really took off. But the lessons learned about designer developer handoff at the time one, I think designers and developers don't appreciate each other enough. I think, I think we need to like give each other more appreciation because I think engineers just see the handoff and designers just see things that aren't implemented correctly. But both roles are actually really, really important. However, if you try to make a product that solves things for two different people at once, it's really, really treach. Everyone's very happy to tell you, like what the other person should do to make the whole workflow better. But actually changing what you're doing it requires like the constraints of your job to change. You won't do it just to make the benefit the greater good. And so it was very hard to figure out who to listen to exactly to do the product development. And so I think like when you're making a product, you really need to start with a narrow focus on I'm solving for this person very specifically their problems. And I'm not trying to make something just look better for everyone. You boil the ocean is like the classic quote around that. It gave me a deeper appreciation. Working on modules gave me a deeper appreciation for the designer's role because it is what taught me that the designer's role is problem space exploration. It's expanding the possibility set. It's exploring what's happened before, it's exploring what's possible now. And a tool that does that really well is very different than a tool for building. And so this is why people say all the time like, I love framer and I love framer. Framer is Awesome. I don't design in Framer. I keep designing a framer that I bring it to framer and they don't know why.
- [10:09]
Rid
Exactly.
- [10:10]
Steven Haney
This is why I think is that framer is a tool for building. And so it has constraints that you can pick, you can pick how it renders at this resolution and this browser and you can dial things in really well. But that's a narrowing. It's a. Exactly how is this thing going to work? And you're specifying exactly how this thing is going to work, but that comes after the design phase. That comes after you figured out what to do in the first place. I see this very clear delineation between design tools. Free flowing, encouraging exploration, supporting you trying 10 different things at once. And like, you know, cloning and dragging and branching off versus a building tool where you're narrowing things in, you're dialing things in because they need to be perfect once the user is touching them.
- [10:49]
Rid
I think a lot of people building right now are kind of obsessed with bridging that gap and leading with the novelty of you can do everything you're designing and it's code and it's all tailwind and all this kind of stuff. By just carving out that design chunk and saying, you know what? No, these are two separate mental models, two separate headspaces, two separate jobs to be done. I would imagine in order to take this leap, you probably had some core differences and ways that you wanted to innovate on that first design messy exploration bucket. So what were some of those pillar differences that you set out to either solve or add in the early days?
- [11:28]
Steven Haney
Based on the strength of Radix, we were acquired by a company called workos which does authent identity. Very cool company, great founder. I learned a lot. I ended up basically running product there for about two years and I learned so much there about product development and how to think about market. Ultimately, off isn't necessarily like a specialty for me or any passion or anything. And so I was kind of like, you know, didn't feel like I was totally in the right place. I love, I love the people and I loved what I was doing. And I wanted to get back into the creative space. I want to get back into design design space. And so what I optimized for starting this company was who do I want to be on zoom calls with? Who do I want to be talking to every day? Who do I want to like get up out of bed and be like, oh, my calendar is full and feel good about that rather than like stressed out or like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be, you know, so hard. And so I really picked based on this is what I want to do with my life and, and this is the energy that I want to have more so than like competitive research or like thinking about, you know, opportunities. I still have founded it so started paper and I started looking around and what I feel like is, is in the last few years we have like a very dominant player in the, in the design space. Obviously, you know, Figma has basically 100% nearly of product design. We have some great tools like Sketch that have been around for a while, but are kind of like relatively stable at this point. You know, I don't think there, there's not tremendous amount of change anymore. People really like the URLs and the sharing the live aspect of Figma. Obviously it hasn't changed very much in the last few years. I don't think that's like a like contentious thing to say. I think, you know, it's a, it's, it's pretty clear like there hasn't been a ton of change. If you look at, you know, Figma's position, they've done so I'm a huge Figma fan. They've done so much for the design community. They basically created a way for more designers to have jobs. If you think about it like they were the right place, right time, but they facilitated that. But now once you own like almost all of a market, like you need growth, you need to think about other markets too. And so I think that's what you're seeing with slides. And now they make. And all of these are great things that I think they're going to do really well with. But I do think they're inherently less focused on product design, marketing design, brand design than they, than they used to be. Not even in a bad way. It's just like they're obviously not shipping as fast as they used to in those, in those areas. And so I think that opens up an area for like what's, what's the next thing? Like how do we bring more creativity back into design tools? How do we make design tools that are help you move faster as the job market is tougher than it used to be. And so I think there's an opportunity there and that's kind of what we're, we're excited to go after.
- [13:40]
Rid
So we're going to do a screen share coming up here. I do kind of want to see how you've thought about bringing creativity back into a design tool and what that looks like and what your strategy is there. I still also kind of want to get a little bit more of the underlying why and how you're thinking about the space more broadly. And something that I saw you talk about is this idea of like an approved rectangles mindset. And I'm curious, like, what do you mean by that and how does paper intend to do things differently?
- [14:10]
Steven Haney
For the last few years, flat design has been very in. And at the same time we had design tools take over that you can use vectors mostly, you know, Sketch and Figma. Before that, we were in Photoshop doing crazy stuff that was like, you know, pixel by pixel, right? So there was this kind of like moment in the ecosystem where flat design was in. Our tools were all vector based and that worked really well. I think there's like a hunger in the design community right now to like kind of break out of that a little bit. You see people doing insane things in Figma now where they're like using a million shapes and masks and gradients to do really cool stuff. The new brush tool I think that they just launched will help with that too. You can see the demand of like, the need to make more creative stuff again. And the current set of tools are not good for that. They weren't made for that. It's the constraints of their technology are not made for like big creative exploration or branching out from vector shapes. So that's one thing we're going after is like, obviously, if you follow paper at all, you know, we're into shaders, so we're putting like animated shaders onto the canvas. The thought here is like, shaders are really hard even for engineers that work on like that type of thing all day. And so why, why can't we take shaders though and give the power of them to people who have like the taste or the design sense, or the people that should be dialing in colors and timings and let them ship that finished asset directly rather than, you know, if you want to do a shader effect now you're probably trying to draw a picture of it somehow in Figma and then having an engineer reproduce it somehow. And they're probably not going to do the same thing. What we're trying to do is if you look at like game development pipelines, like a 3D modeler makes a model and that shifts to production, the engineer maybe like plugs it into the code base. I think that's a really good workflow. If we can get the tools into a place where they can do that. Where you let this person that just thinks about the look and the feel and the user experience ship the actual thing that they make to production. It can be shipping the entire site like a framer type thing, but I'm talking more about individual assets, individual animations, individual timings where the engineer doesn't have to reproduce them with a different library. So when we think about creativity, part of it is just like, yeah, we'll give you tools to create more interesting things. And then part of it is we're going to let you ship some of those things. Those are going to be in a form where you can now ship them to production.
- [16:12]
Rid
I mean, the piece by piece strategy actually makes a lot of sense to me because the bigger the artifact is, the harder it becomes to actually get something into production. And I think you see that a lot with some of the AI prototyping tools now. They're amazing and they have a really great purpose. But an engineer does not want to take that entire body of code and get it into a production code base, you know, and so like the, the more granular and well defined you get, get in terms of like what this asset is and how it performs, I think actually probably is the shortest path to water for designers to be able to contribute to production.
- [16:47]
Steven Haney
Oh, a hundred percent. And can you imagine an engineer's relief if you give them a finished shader that they don't have to figure out, like how to reproduce exactly to your picture in Figma? The other thing that's cool about this too is like when you're designing, you're working with the real constraints. Great example of this is progressive blur. It just shipped Figma just shipped this in product configuration. And progressive blur is really cool. I love it. It's actually very hard to do on the web with web technology. Like you can do it with SVG filters. There's performance gets pretty bad pretty fast. And so sometimes there's like designing without constraints is good. And then sometimes if you're going to ship something to production, you actually do need some of the constraints so you can feel what the user is going to feel too.
- [17:24]
Rid
Totally.
- [17:25]
Steven Haney
So part of this is navigating that and figuring out when freedom is good, when real constraints are good, and switching back and forth.
- [17:32]
Rid
All right, so enough talking, let's start looking at this thing. Can you walk us through the shaders componen component? Because I'm sure there are people listening that are just like, okay, I've heard shaders come up on the show a little bit, but it's a Pretty opaque box right now for a lot of people.
- [17:45]
Steven Haney
So, I mean, shaders fundamentally are just like pieces of code that run on your graphics card. And the reason that they are interesting is you can do, you know, wild effects with them. And so on screen, I'm demonstrating what we call our warp shader, which is one of my favorites. They let you do these kind of like animated crazy effects and you can have like, you know, this is a pretty custom effect. You can also do simple things like dot grids. I'm way zoomed out. And we, we like using it for patterns, actually, because when you're doing patterns in traditional design tools, you might need to create each dot individually as an element. And what we find is people make their design files, like, super slow because they have like 10,000 dots.
- [18:25]
Rid
I tried to do an auto layout of dots recently and I just deleted it and took a screenshot because it just broke my entire design file.
- [18:32]
Steven Haney
And so shaders give us the ability to render. It's almost free. Um, it's, it's almost like free. And so we give you these controls so, you know, you can pick size range and opacity range to create different effects and spacings. I'm making the dot size big to make sure it comes over screen share. Okay. And you see people doing this already with plugins in other tools. So there's pat, you know, the pattern, there's like wave patterns. All of these are just another layer in the design tool. And this, by the way, this is paper. I didn't even say say hello to paper. We love the 2D canvas. It's such a great interactive way to design. I don't think it's going away. And the idea with these is not I'm going to take this shader and I'm going to ship it directly to production without modifying it. Let's. Let's combine a couple of shaders. We have this meta balls one. This one's pretty cool. So you can combine these things with, like, blending modes to create all kinds of, like, new. I don't know, this one's kind of like, I don't know if I would use this, but, you know, you have full control over colors and blending modes. And the idea is that these are tools to be able to combine together. Oh, that's pretty cool. Some people ask me like, you know, this warp shader is pretty cool, but everyone's gonna put this on their website as soon as it's out. And it's like, yeah, maybe. I hope not. I wanna see people using These to create new worlds. You know, I think if you're a brand designer, if you're always trying to come up with new looks and new ways for things to feel like, hopefully this gives you new styles that are in your toolkit. In the next month or two, we probably have 20 to 30. Eventually I wanna have like 50 plus different effects. There's gonna be a mix of like simple stuff, more advanced stuff. And I just think it's, it's really fun. It's like encouraging exploration.
- [20:01]
Rid
That's the takeaway for me is like I understood conceptually that shaders were important, interesting, and something that like really talented designers that understood how to manipulate this kind of technology were using and that it was just locked in some GitHub file and I was never really going to be able to mess with it. And so accessible is the word. Like all of a sudden I'm like.
- [20:21]
Steven Haney
Hey, I can do this 100%. Yeah, yeah. And we're trying to find that right balance of giving enough controls where you can create new things, but it's not overwhelming. At the same time, a big part of our like core philosophy is play is just like the experience of play, exploration, move, don't be afraid to move the slider, you know, and see what happens and like, and iterate based on that.
- [20:41]
Rid
Something that I'm just going to call out too that's interesting is like the shaders are playing on the canvas itself, which is a little bit of a departure from what we expect in a design tool. So can you talk about that for a second?
- [20:52]
Steven Haney
Well, this goes to. Vector tools have been what we've been using for a long time. And vector tools are great at SVGs and they're great at shapes, they're great at basic shapes, they're not great at animations. And this is why you don't see a lot of animation design in our existing tool set. They aren't great at what we call like pixel based effects or roster effects, you know, things like this which are very, I'll zoom way in, you know, each pixel is a different color and in different interesting ways. Right. And so vector tools are not good at this. They're not made for this. It's not an SVG kind of task. And you can get there, but it's not fundamentally made for it. And so we're just doing an entirely different rendering technology. We are using the browser's own renderer. And so everything in here is actually, it's a div. Everything. A rectangle, a box, a frame is all just Browser tech and css. We've invested a tremendous amount of engineering in making sure it's super fast and like feels just so good. And you're not going to notice that you're not in traditional design tool. You're not going to, you're not going to feel like you're in a web building tool, but you actually are. As you're manipulating things in here, you are changing actual HTML, actual css.
- [21:56]
Rid
So let's return to something we were talking about earlier then in handoff. Like this is a fundamentally different foundation. So then what is your vision for handoff in a tool like this?
- [22:06]
Steven Haney
It's not something we're focusing on, which sounds funny. But again, this goes back to my lesson learned about, you know, handoff is like the reason it's a problem is like it's kind of in between jobs and no one gets hired or fired for it. I want to make improvements to it though, because right now the way it works isn't very good. And so I think there's opportunities. One of the things we're doing is, hey, you've, you've made a website. Like, this is technically a website. Hello world, this is my website because it is like under, under the hood. It's, it's divs, it's CSS now. It's not a responsive website. You might not want to ship this to production, but it would work. It would render exactly as you see it. So a big piece of this is just like, it's going to look exactly like it looks to you. You can copy out the shader, for instance, or entire layouts, you can copy them as images, you can also copy them as React. And we also, we're going to have like basic vanilla tailwind. All that stuff we can do too. We just started with React and so if you, this code, you don't need to like know what the code means or anything, but this code that you're looking at is literally exactly the same code that's running right here. And so if you give this to, if you put it in framer, if you give it to an engineer to plug into your code base, you're going to get exactly what you designed. So let me make like something that's like a little cooler. That's pretty cool. So you know your colors, your steps, your scale, whatever parameters you're setting, you're going to get out. And so this is, this comes to that, the ability to ship exactly what you made.
- [23:27]
Rid
Honestly, the more that I think about where all this is headed, it feels like I mean, gosh, already redlining feels archaic, but even the way that we think about handoff as a form of documentation right now feels like AI is probably going to eat that. And so it's probably not a bet that I would invest in either.
- [23:46]
Steven Haney
Well, I think that's true too. I mean, code gen is getting, you know, is going to be better and better. The ability to take free form designs and turn them into web layouts and things getting better and better. Maybe this transitions us to AI topic a little bit, but like how do we use AI to help designers and just makers in general, like they're in control. It's not like prompt to finish design. I mean that's cool if you're, if you want something really fast. But like when I'm, if I have a pre existing design system, if I have a pre existing brand, I need to use like my stuff and I need to be in full control. I'm steering. And so how do we use AI to just like speed that process up rather than like trying to replace obviously is a lost cause.
- [24:18]
Rid
Was there anything else you want to show us inside of the tool? You know, we have thousands of designers watching now, so this is your chance to kind of take it for a little spin.
- [24:26]
Steven Haney
So you know, all the table stakes are there. I mean, I'll just quickly show you. You can do borders, of course, and you can do shadows. All the things that you want to do in a design tool. So this is a URL multiplayer works. You can share it with clients, you can bring other people in, you can bring your team in and that's really important. I want to bring more of Illustrator and more of Photoshop and more of ImageGen all into this one place where your team kind of meets up to review designs. And so one of the things we're working on now is like when you put images in Photoshop filters and I won't demo this yet because it's still like a work in progress. But having the ability to do the like 80% of Photoshop in a tool that's like the central place that you're in I think is really powerful and really interesting to zoom out a little bit. Like people right now are switching tools a lot. I see an increase in how often people are switching tools in the last year or so where oftentimes people have workflows now that have like seven or eight tools in them that slows your flow down. Every time you switch tools you're like, oh, maybe I'll go check Twitter, you know, maybe I'll check my text messages and you just kind of get distracted. And I think having everything in one canvas is really interesting. Another example of this is everyone's doing Image Gen, we're doing Image Gen 2. So let's just, let's just check it out. So let's do like a, a thinking person sitting on a cliff, staring up at the night sky. We'll do like a Perplexity style image generation. AI Image Gen I think is really cool because it lets you explore very quickly and I love doing it on the canvas. I'll just hide the UI here because you can get this branching and you can. One of the things we're doing is we're trying like four different models at once and each model has different strengths and weaknesses and you can kind of.
- [25:57]
Rid
These images right here are using different models.
- [25:59]
Steven Haney
Yeah, yeah. So this UI isn't designed yet, so apologies for the work in progress here. But. So this one's Flux, this one is Ideogram, this is Google's.
- [26:08]
Rid
That's really cool.
- [26:09]
Steven Haney
This one's Recraft. And you know, they're all very different stuff. Like Google's model is very photorealistic. And then like Ideogram creates these dreamy images that I think is more what I was going for for this one, you know, so they all are good in different ways. And then we do edit flows too, of course. So you can like prompt again to edit this and this, this actually uses ChatGPT's model because it's the best at editing. So I don't know. What's that? Cool? Let's add some like, add a flock of crows in the distance sky. I don't know what we're going for here, but we'll have some fun with it. What's cool, I think on the canvas is like you can branch, you can clone, you can just work really quickly to go through. And I don't know if you like, if you've seen my mid journey, it's like thousands of images as you just like prompt and prompt and prompt and prompt. And so I think this 2D canvas approach to Image Den is really, really interesting. And again, you're in your design tool already, so as soon as you have something you want, you know, you can start, you can start working with it. I think we need to take the same approach to uigen. I can't demo this yet because we're still working on it. But this same like branching, I can clone anything I can prompt almost using the canvas as the prompting mechanism. So if I had like A finished design, being able to select it and, you know, apply my library to it automatically, use my existing design system to apply to it. Like, LLMs are very good at this. And because paper is using code under the hood, LLMs are already really good at speaking code and there's like no mismatch there. These things are just like the obvious next step for me. And I think they're very. The way to think about them is very small. It's very incremental, where it's speeding up design flows. It's not like skipping them. The designer's in control, the designer's steering and the AI is an assistant that helps them move faster.
- [27:44]
Rid
I'm encouraged to hear you say that because that is kind of the missing piece that I feel right now is like, I always have ideas. Like when I opened up the canvas, I'm never like, gosh, what do I draw? You know, I always have something in my brain. But what I want is AI to amplify that initial creative spark and help me get to just a bunch of different permutations that I wasn't able to come up with on my own quickly.
- [28:09]
Steven Haney
Sometimes it's more structured, sometimes you have a design system already and you need to work within that. And so I think the tool needs to respect that or it's probably kind of useless for a lot of teams. Sometimes if you're making a new brand, you have like blank slate and you can kind of explore whatever you want to do. Right. And so I think facilitating both of those flows is really important. LLMs are not. They don't have great taste, you know, and maybe they will over time. The image models actually have a lot better taste visually than the text based models do. So I think that designer role of using the LLM to create their vision, like that's the workflow of the future.
- [28:40]
Rid
Anything else in the current state of the product that we should be demoing or talking about before we kind of zoom out?
- [28:45]
Steven Haney
I'll actually just talk about paper a little bit. So we, you know, very small team. We have basically three full time people right now. We have a couple contractors. We started nine months ago, which kind of blows my mind. We started last September. So I feel like so excited about the progress we've made and the. So grateful for the community support and the attention that we're receiving. It's honestly a lot more than we expected to be so soon. We have like 20,000 people on the mailing list. I'm like, oh my gosh, we're just getting this alpha out the door. I want to get open like as soon as possible. We're in this funny situation now where it's like, like there's been a lot of attention, people have high expectations. I want people to know like we are, we're so committed, we love design. Like we are going to make the best thing that we possibly can for everyone. It'll take time, right? And so we're, I want to get this open hopefully this month so people can get in here, start playing around. It's going to be pre release software, it's going to, there will be bugs, there will be new things to figure out. But we're just going to ship every day. We have super high velocity.
- [29:33]
Rid
On one hand, nine nons is super short. You've accomplished a ton in like a very small time frame. On the other hand, nine months kind of feels like an eternity at the rate that all of this is moving. So I'm wondering like if there are clear strategic shifts or things that you have learned that maybe have led you down a slightly different path than you originally imagined when you first started out.
- [29:54]
Steven Haney
If I had to call myself like a type of designer, it would probably be a product designer. And so I assumed we were making a tool for product design. I thought we were going to have tokens and components and design system stuff like day one, that was the first thing we're going to do. I have this rule where I have to talk to a designer every day and the reason for that is like to keep me rooted because when I start, you know, these days I'm doing a lot of engineering and you can get lost from your users. And so I have to stay in touch with a designer every single day. And through that what I've learned is that this hunger for creativity, this hunger in the design community to create new experiences and new new worlds and new looks and it's like the existing tools aren't quite doing it the way that we want. I didn't, I wasn't planning when we set out, I had no shader. The shaders thing wasn't in my mind. What I saw was somebody trying to do this in Figma and just struggling. And then their front end developer didn't, wasn't able to implement it either. And I was like, oh, that's a broken workflow. Let me, let me go work on that. And so that's kind of the approach we're taking is like talk to users, find out where things are breaking down and like try to fix those things and make them better for them.
- [30:52]
Rid
I figured you'd have a pretty robust answer to that question, just given how much has been happening. But I didn't expect the Shaders piece to be the answer because. Because that has been the thing that paper is synonymous with, at least in the very beginning. Like, that was what you kind of identified and went to market with. And so the fact that you didn't even see that coming when you set out on this journey is really fascinating.
- [31:15]
Steven Haney
We are not just a shader tool. You know, it's like one thing that we do and, and I love it. I'm really glad we're doing it. I don't know if you saw the. The Liquid logo. You know, we made this mini app where people can upload their logos and get Apple Magic liquid metal applied to them. And, you know, this was super fun and it did incredibly well. Crazy viral this by our standards. This was kind of proving out the technology for us. It was like, you know, make the cool shader, make the processor for your logo, combine the two things. I think what it is, though, is like you have to listen to your users, man. You have to listen for where things are breaking. And what I'm hearing in design, in design world right now is things are breaking with being able to create things that don't look like everyone else and being able to actually get that to production. You know, again, you talk to a designer every day. You talk to one of, if you're a founder, talk to your users every day. Just really, really list, listen, you know, and don't try to tell them anything. Just, just listen and you'll find things that work. This has worked because so many people resonated with it. It's a problem that a lot of people, I think, are feeling and excited about new solutions for.
- [32:13]
Rid
It feels like skating where the puck is headed too. I think we kind of are exiting this design systems obsession almost where even that way of working influenced the tools pretty heavily. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, my gosh, AI is so good at spitting out really high quality. Chad CN and it just looks crisp and clean and anybody can do it in the snap of a finger. And so what does standing out look like in that world? It's a little bit of a murky answer. And so directionally feels very interesting to me to point at that answer because it feels like it's going to be super important in a world where a really solid, clean baseline is effectively universally acceptable.
- [32:54]
Steven Haney
The job market at the same time has become more competitive too, and hopefully that's just a cyclical thing that's happening. But as a designer, you feel like a lot more challenged now to stand out, especially if you're in the brand or like a visual space. But even on the product side, it feels like a time where you need to add skill sets. You know, a lot of people have told me this. At first when I was talking to designers, I was like, are you trying to learn to code? And I was like, no. Like, very clearly the vast majority of people that are professional designers are not interested in learning to code. And I think it's totally fair. It's a different discipline. I think if you do want to code, go for it. I think it's awesome. Like, you should definitely do it. Design engineering, awesome. We need more design engineers. But if you are a traditional designer that doesn't want to learn to code, like, I think that is totally valid too. That rule for that designer is not going away. If anything, I see a little bit more product management leaking in where it's like maybe you're also coordinating a little bit more in a figjam file now than you used to be. Or the designer can often end up being this facilitator for the stakeholders, almost like when stakeholders come in to look at something. So I think like upskilling in those ways is really important. Tools that help you do that job are really important as well. Comments File organization. We're doing folders in our file management. It's a common request.
- [33:59]
Rid
You know, that's low hanging fruit right there.
- [34:01]
Steven Haney
Why not? You know, I just. We're letting people tag art board. Like you can have a tag system. If you want to tag art boards, you can invent your own system and then you can search across tags from the file management screen. Says different ways to like get into content. I think a big part of that designer role is like other people are coming into your design files and they're having trouble finding stuff. Like that's a really common problem I hear about for designers that are looking to like upskill and be more competitive in the job market right now. Tools should support that and they should be working on helping you upskill in the ways that you need to.
- [34:29]
Rid
I'm a big believer in the power of video to explain my thinking as a designer. So when it's time to get feedback, I'll drop a loom link and slack and another link to a Figma prototype and feedback will be scattered everywhere. And I mean it's a mess. So I'm building the product that I've always wanted to exist. And it's called Inflight. You can kind of think of it like an async crit. It's an easy way to share a video walkthrough along with an interactive prototype or whatever you're designing, and then AI interviews the people on your team to get you the feedback that you need and and organizes everything for you in a beautiful insights page. So right now I'm only giving access to Dive Club listeners. So if you want to be one of the first to use Inflight, head to Dive Club, slash Inflight to claim your spot. Given your background, I would totally expect you to be another person that comes on the show and talks about the importance of how designers should become builders. And that's just like the next wave, you know. And so your perspective adds a little bit of weight almost for you to come on here and be like, you know what? Actually, you don't have to. And this idea of, like, alignment and contributing to strategy and getting all of the stakeholders on the same page is actually very, very necessary and just a good way to point your own career. Even as a designer.
- [35:47]
Steven Haney
I was a design engineer for many years. I love that role. I think we need more of them. If you're interested in it, go for it. You should learn to code. I don't think you have to. I don't think that design role is going away. I think that AI is coming for every role in different ways for sure. And you have to learn how to use some of these AI tools 100%. We need design tools that use it to help you. But I guess my advice would be if you are looking to upscale and you don't want to learn to code, probably get better at, you know, user empathy. I mean, these are all core designer things already, but like user empathy, stakeholder management, coordinating decisions, facilitating decision making, being really high context of what's going on with your product and your business. These are important designer jobs as well, and those are not changing. Like, that's not going to go away anytime soon.
- [36:28]
Rid
How far can you push productizing something like that? Because a lot of the things that you're talking about do feel very interpersonal and happening in, you know, Slack and stand up. How much of that can you own and assist with with something like a design tool?
- [36:43]
Steven Haney
Oh, I think a tremendous amount. I think that, like, there are major problems with our workflows right now in terms of getting stakeholders into Figma files, getting developers into Figma files. Dev mode sells really, really well, makes a lot of money. Most people don't Use it. I think that's not like a secret. You know, the people that do use it only use pieces of it. It's not a successful, like, handoff mechanism for the industry to use. I remember this actually this very, like, specific moment at when I was at work OS where the CEO came into a Figma file and he just wanted to, like, change a background. He was looking at a designer's work. He's like, what if we try this other background? And he like, dragged it over and the whole thing just, like, fell apart. And he was just like, oh, you know, I'm out of here. Design tools that facilitate like, like stakeholder review. And if you want to get PMs into design tools, make it a little easier for them to tweak things or to explore. Prompting is, is helpful to get quick results, to explore things a little faster there. I just keep coming back to like, yes, designers make really cool, pretty, beautiful things. Yes, they have high user empathy. In a team setting, they're often decision maker facilitators. Whether they're making the decision or whether they're helping the team make the decision, that's like one of their core jobs. And I don't know that design tools are doing, other than being in a URL that are very accessible that you can send around. I don't know that design tools are doing a great job of helping them with that role. Right now.
- [37:55]
Rid
It makes sense. I mean, even in my own interviews with Inflight, that's been a very clear theme. I haven't relied on Figma comments in a long time in order to get meaningful stakeholder feedback, but I kind of always just assumed it was me. But it's totally not. Like, one out of ten designers is actually relying on Figma comments as like, the default way of looping in stakeholders and seeing what people think, which I didn't really expect, but I guess it kind of does make sense. It's an intimidating place for a lot of people who just have no familiarity with design tools. And so I definitely can see why you've kind of underlined that as an opportunity area.
- [38:32]
Steven Haney
You know, role in the team is to help people come in and add their suggestions. And comments are like a step toward that. But I think it's, you know, there's a lot more that could be done.
- [38:41]
Rid
Yeah, I mean, visualizing your ideas, that's one of the most exciting things about ImageGen. And what you're kind of doing is like, what does it look like to be able to just say, oh, man, you know, what, what if we tweak this and then it just happens and you don't have to actually understand the tool at all. It feels like ChatGPT.
- [38:55]
Steven Haney
If a PM is coming into a design tool and wants to, like, quickly try a different look, they're. They don't need to shift that thing, they don't need to hand that thing off. It could be an image, it doesn't need to be this editable thing. And so it's like, when do we need images of stuff? When do we need editable things of stuff? When do we need things that can be handed off? Being pretty clear about those distinctions, I think is helpful when you're making these tools and giving the less technical person an ability to try an idea really quickly and then communicate that back to the designer, I think is like super valuable. So, yeah, a hundred percent.
- [39:26]
Rid
I think ImageGen is a perfect example of something that at one point felt like this is a product and now it's very clearly a commoditized feature. You almost expect it in any creative tool. And that happened really quickly. So when you kind of look into the future a little bit, like, where are the real moats for a tool like paper? Like, how do you create something that is defensible?
- [39:53]
Steven Haney
I think it's really representative of what is going to continue to happen with any of these AI features. Right now it costs us about 4 cents per image to generate it, for instance. And so you'll see if you go do the math on all the tools that do image gen and like the cost that they're charging you, they're charging you about 4 cents of the image. I think one of the things we're going to do with pricing is probably just like basically unlimited. And we'll take a loss in the short term because the models are going to go cheaper and better and faster and it's going to happen really, really fast. Right. And so I was trying to figure this kind of leading into pricing a little bit, but I was trying to figure out how to charge for AI. And I don't like token systems because it's scarcity. It's like you're spending something. And again, our tool is like, I want you to feel free and I want you to explore and I want you to generate a hundred images if you need a hundred images. And I don't want you to be like, worrying about cost. But what I'm excited by is like, clearly the cost is going to go to near zero. It almost is already, but it's going to continue. And so why don't we just build for that world now? So I think you to look at how things will change, you got to think second order, you know, like how things are going to change and kind of build for that future with, with the AI features. But the other thing is I really don't think anything that's like prompt to finished text, prompt to finished thing is defensible because the general purpose models will eat it. Claude is already amazing at making code. I mostly use Claude if I'm going to do a quick sandbox of some code because it's already really good at it and over time like it'll get better and better. And so when I think about defensibility, what I really think about is interface. One of the of the big bets we made with paper was spending the first nine months really of the company on making sure when you're resizing something you can go by one pixel and it feels really good. You know, when you hold alt and shift and you get proportional mirror to resize, it works exactly how you expect. All your muscle memory is there from your design tools because that stuff is really hard. One, you have to know it, you have to be authentic, you have to be a designer to even know it exists. And then. And two, it just takes a tremendous amount of time and engineering effort to make sure it's perfect. Those things I think are defensible. Right? So if you're making an app that uses AI and you're looking to make a long term company, I think you need to think about how your interface is unique. So again like using the context from the whole canvas, letting someone draw and use that as part of the prompt into the AI. Unique ways that feel really good for the user to use as methods of prompting are more defensible because a general purpose model can't go build every type of interface. You know, maybe in the long run they will, but in the five to ten year time period those things I think are a lot more unique and difficult and thus defensible.
- [42:15]
Rid
Are there any other like second order effects or potential trends that you have your eye on as you're thinking about the type of company that you want to build? Once you kind of knock out all of these incremental improvements that you're currently working through?
- [42:29]
Steven Haney
I like having a long term view, I like having a long term strategy, but I also really like meeting people where they are today. You can get lost in trying to make something brand new if you don't solve people's problems today. So we're very like focused in that incremental six week at a time, talk to users, fix their problems. I don't think you can go wrong with that. And then at the same time you do have to manage that long term view of what are we trying to build, which our mission as a company is more creativity in the design space, helping designers be successful in the industry and the job market. And today that looks like a canvas app where I can give you shaders and AI generation and help you speed up your workflows. Tomorrow it might look different and so can't get too attached to your current solution either. I think stay attached to your problems. That's my advice on this one, is pick your problems that you love so you won't get burnt out and then stay attached to them and don't give up on your problems. The problems you're trying to solve is way more important than your current solution.
- [43:20]
Rid
It's a pretty good outlook because you kind of combine two different things where if you can solve short run problems with something that is banking on a future change, do it. But don't bank on future change to influence or maybe play too big of a role in short run product strategy. Especially at the rate of everything's changing with AI.
- [43:38]
Steven Haney
Yeah, I think so. I mean, if you can see something, go for it, you know, if you can clearly see something that no one else sees and you have good confidence, go for it. Because I do think that that's important. But you don't need to force it. If you don't see something, don't force it. Go ahead and solve today's problems at the same time, you know, and just be looking for those moments where you get these glimpses of clarity about the future and then act on them quickly when you do. One thing I've learned as I've gotten older is that things will look very different tomorrow, things will look very different next week. And over the long run of making a company, there will be these tremendous ups and downs. It's a tremendous roller coaster. And at any moment you need to, like when you're low, just remember where the average is and when you're high, remember where the average is and be consistent. Show up every day, ship every day. The compounding effect of small wins is incredible. And so yeah, have that long term vision and be looking for those moments of clarity about the future that no one else sees a hundred percent. I mean, you see them, act on them, but I don't think it's the only thing. I think you need to meet people where they are today and help people on their today's workflows at the same time. So we'll see if that's a good strategy in the long term. You know, we're nine months in, so take my advice for what it's worth. But that's how. So that's how we're going about things.
- [44:42]
Rid
I mean, it makes sense. And I would imagine you're probably not lacking for clarity on Roadmap when you're building something that people have absurdly high expectations for and a ton of muscle memory and, you know, feature requests. So there's probably a lot of obvious things to build still.
- [44:58]
Steven Haney
Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, a big challenge is signal to noise. People want different things, there's different types of users. And making sure you're filtering that down to one user that you're really interested in going after to is a big challenge.
- [45:09]
Rid
You've touched on the one user. But maybe even just to be super clear for people who are listening or kind of just like, is this for me? Like, who is the ICP in your mind right now? And yeah. Does that then create a situation where you have some clarity on the types of feature requests or the types of rabbit holes that you're going to ignore, at least for the time being.
- [45:29]
Steven Haney
This is something we need to work on. I have clarity on. I want to make something for people that are exploring and expanding possibility, space and creating new things and being creative and working without constraints to figure out what to do and facilitate decisions. That's a pretty big group. That's like not an ICP definition, which is a good thing in the long run. Like, that's a, you know, a big group of people to solve problems for. But I do think when you first launch your product, like, you gotta solve a hundred percent of somebody's problem. I don't know if you've seen that meme where it's like product development. If you're building a car, don't build the tires and then the frame and the steering wheel. It's like build the skateboard and then the scooter and then the bicycle. 100% true. Right. And so you gotta solve 100% of someone's problem before they're gonna switch to your tool. I don't have perfect clarity. I kind of think about these curious for your takes. I see like brand designers who create worlds that are very visual. I see marketing designers who oftentimes make websites or compile assets together to create things. I see product designers who are making UIs and use design systems quite A bit. That's kind of how I see the lay of the land of the different types. And even within that, I think you should be more specific when you're making a product about who you're trying to help. And in the long run I want to help all of them. And that's kind of like something I'm trying to work through right now is like, but you have to pick to launch, you know, your first thing. And, and so we've been drawn towards the marketing, the brand side because I think the existing tools maybe aren't satisfying that need as much as the product need, but I think the product has a lot of opportunity too. I think over the next few months you'll see us solidify that and get our point of view stronger and, and exactly what we're going to do first. In the long run, I want to be a general purpose tool that all of these types of folks can, can use to, to make new things.
- [47:02]
Rid
I'm even thinking about my own career and I've been a very different type of ICP in different roles. Right?
- [47:09]
Steven Haney
Yeah, yeah.
- [47:10]
Rid
Six, seven years ago I was owning this massive design system SDK for like mega churches to make their own custom mobile apps. And it was how do you create incredible levels of fleamability and customization while having everything rooted in this really rich component structure? Right. I would have been a terrible ICP for you at that, that stage. Right. It would have made no sense because everything's very system level defining. If I was doing it now, I'd be really into the weeds of component properties and variants and all that kind of stuff. Whereas in my current day to day my FIGMA is a mess. I have nothing to find, I have no organization. I have like 20 very, very minimal components. I mean we're talking like buttons and basically that's it it. And a lot of times I'm not even completely finishing the design before I kind of iron something out in code. So there's really no handoff process. And some of the stuff that's in the app right now has just been like me using ChatGPT to generate an empty state because I don't even know what the visual language is.
- [48:20]
Steven Haney
Right.
- [48:20]
Rid
I'm trying to kind of figure it out and make a mess still. And so yeah, there's almost no constraints and I have a hunger for creativity where I'm like, like this is, this makes a lot of sense.
- [48:31]
Steven Haney
One thing that's really interesting about design tools in general, there's so many table stakes and it's a It's in any product you make, there's a danger of like rising the whole tide together rather than doing a hundred percent of something. Design tools are the, the, the most treacherous for this because you have to have a gradient tool and you have to have like image cropping and no one's going to use it until you do because other tools have that. So there's this tremendous amount of like kind of horizontal table stick kind of stuff that you have to build. And so I think the core part of our challenge is like getting that done in a really high quality way that helps people. You know, we can improve these, these gradient tools in these color pickers while at the same time figuring out workflows that we can solve like 100% of the way. I like embracing the mess. I think everyone's workflow right now, especially on that first half of the build phase, the more creative exploration phase, is very messy right now. I think that's a good thing. Like, some people spend a lot of time getting organized again at the end. But facilitating that expansion is a big thing I think about and helping people do and then whether that's bringing more AI in so you can do your, whatever you're doing in ChatGPT and the tool so you don't have to be like context switching quite as much. It's this continual challenge. As a founder, maybe you feel this too, of, gosh, I really need to tighten my ICP definition. And every time you think you've tightened it, you go, oh, that's a lot of people. And they actually have very divergent needs and I need to tighten that more. And like we're nine months in and I'm just like continuing to do this and it's still like, oh, gosh, we got more work to do on, on this too, because otherwise we're going to boil the ocean. You know, you got to avoid that. And after you get in, after you do have like some, some fit, then you can expand very easily, you know, to, to these other things too. So I think it's like you, you have to kind of trick yourself into it. I want to solve problems for everybody, but we'll start with one and then that'll put us in a better position to then expand outwards and create a tool for more people.
- [50:08]
Rid
I have a crazy feature idea for you while you were talking. I like the idea of facilitating the mess, especially if AI is iterating for me and scaling that. But then I want to have the ability to hit a button, maybe give some instructions, but just it organizes the mess and then shines a light and highlights on just the things that are relevant for stakeholders. And all that happens automatically. That would be cool.
- [50:32]
Steven Haney
Oh, there's so much information on your design canvas. We in paper have an advantage of, like, it's already in code, so it's very easy to understand for an LLM, giving that to LLMs in new ways. Again, I go, I keep going back to this brush tool and this is a little more like, you know, off experimenting, thinking out loud, letting people draw on top of the canvas as prompts. If an LLM can see your entire canvas, if you as a human, if we're looking at the same file and I draw something on top of it. You know what I mean? You know what I'm indicating by this drawing? Right, right. And I think LLMs are not far behind in that type of understanding. So can we feed that information in and like, let you basically edit by, like drawing almost like an art director to the LLM where it can then be like, you know, you can X things, you can circle things that you want to keep or highlight to make it just really, really fast to do this so you don't have to manually go through every single thing. I think is really, really cool. A non AI thing that we're doing around this is this goes back to talking to users. A problem I hear all the time. I have my copy of the design and I have know 20, probably 50 art boards in there, 100 art boards in there, and four of them are really important for the client to come check out. And so I have to make a copy of the file, and then I put those four for the client file. And now I have to keep the two in sync. Right. And so this is like a problem I think a lot of people experience. So one of the things we're doing, and this is not AI, but like you, you'll be able to mark individual things inside of a file as like public. I haven't figured out the right word yet, but we'll just call it public for now. Where you can give a link to somebody and they'll only be able to see those articles boards.
- [51:52]
Rid
Yeah, that's right.
- [51:53]
Steven Haney
And maybe on a page by page level too. But I'm just thinking artboards at first. And I think this is gonna be like, I want this like 100% because now you could still have your own version, the client version, but you could have them like literally sitting right next to each other, not in different files. Yeah, it's just something I want so I know, I know it's valuable if I want it too. So, yeah, I felt that even for.
- [52:08]
Rid
Engineers before, where it's like, I have a flow, you know, it's like, this is the one that matters. But I'm like, I have a crazy idea and I do. I just want to try something really quickly, you know, but I want to try it in the context of my original flow and explorations because I'm normally just making like a derivative of a, of a screen or an interaction or something and I'm like, the amount of times that I've added an internal component that's just like, do not pay attention engineers or something like that, you know, like, I do that all the time.
- [52:35]
Steven Haney
Which, which kind of works, you know, I think that works if you're on a team with somebody together, you can kind of get away with that. But if it's a client, maybe you want a little more professional, a little more buttoned up, right? So this is the stuff that nobody's working on right now because they are more focused on bits that like, gosh, there's so many day to day workflows that are just kind of breaking down or cause a lot of extra boilerplate work. Work. And AI is going to be really good at removing boilerplate work. We've already seen that in other fields. And so making, applying it to our field I think is pretty key.
- [53:02]
Rid
Any other experiments or ideas or even just important philosophies or guiding principles, Anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure to get in here?
- [53:12]
Steven Haney
We're nine months into this journey. It's gone so well so far. We've been so lucky to have so much support, both from angel investors, the design community. Folks like you have been tremendous in giving us feedback and support. Support and really grateful for it. I mean, I didn't expect it, you know, it was just this almost this side project that just keeps like ballooning out. And so we're going to get it out to folks as soon as possible. I want to be out in the open. I want to be gathering feedback from designers. I think that's the fastest way to make things that are useful is to be out in the open. And so I asked just for folks to be patient with us as we actually get everything built enough that we can ship it and then to know that we're going to be continuing to improve it every single day going forward. And we're really, really, if you can't tell already, like, we're so user oriented. This company exists exists to help designer. If you want to get on the mailing list, we'll get invite codes going out very soon. Check it out. It's a paper on Twitter and yeah, rude. I appreciate you so much for having me on and having this fun conversation. I love talking about this kind of thing.
- [54:03]
Rid
Yeah, this was a blast. I appreciate you coming on too. I'm so bullish on the long tail of tooling and everything that's going to happen with all this new technology. And also just people like you who can come in and question everything you know and look for. Like you said, like the problem collectors and just like how would we do this based off of everything we know if we were starting today? I'm grateful that people like you are making that happen. So thanks again for coming on today and sharing a little bit about the vision with us.
- [54:31]
Steven Haney
So glad to. Yeah, really appreciate it. Before I let you go, I want.
- [54:34]
Rid
To take just one minute to run you through my favorite products because I'm constantly asked what's in my stack. Framer is how I build websites. Genway is how I do research. Granola is how I take notes during crit. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Lovable is how I build my ideas in code. Mobin is how I find design inspiration. Paper is how I design like a creative. And Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now I've hand selected these companies so that I can do these episodes full time. So by far the number one way to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners.