Eric Li

Great post! I think it's important to keep things simple when you're an early stage founder. I'm the founder of a user research platform, yet I still guide 99% of founders to just go and have 1:1 conversations with customers. As an early stage founder you always want to be 1) trying to build a product people love and 2) learning how you can do #1 better. Interviews are the best way to learn,...

@royce_branning1 and @oliver_hill1 started Clearspace to solve this exact problem.

For Versive: 1) Friends and network for the first few, and 2) cold outreach to target customers on LinkedIn for the rest.

I haven't discovered anything that is good enough to use as part of my workflow as a designer / founder (other than ChatGPT and Claude). That said, I think some products are exploring interesting ideas that have potential. On the interface design side: Galileo AI, UIzard, Figma (when they turn their AI feature back on 😬), Magic Patterns, v0 by Vercel. On the image generation side:...

Currently, I think AI has the most potential in the research and problem-definition stages of the design process. I think when it comes to actually designing interfaces, generative AI doesn't yet add enough value to professional designers. Companies like Figma, Galileo, Vercel (v0), and Magic Patterns are trying some cool things that may have potential but I haven't found them useful in my own...

I think conducting a small number of user interviews is one of the simplest and most effective methods. Depending on where you are in the process, these can be purely focused on problem discovery or also include usability tests. Interviews get you deeper qualitative feedback that helps you understand not just what a user would do but also why they do it. They're also great ways to collect...

Congrats on the launch @royce_branning1 @anteloper 🔥 I'm a big fan of Clearspace (and a paid subscriber)! I love the UX of the buffer and the intentional session timer. It cut down my opens of Instagram and Reddit from some embarrassing number to pretty much 0 and for me that's absolutely worth the price.