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Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

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21–30 of 75 posts

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#21
post #16

This is really cool. I'm bad at making anything look good, so the more things like this the better. I noticed you had Google Slides support (presumably for making themes based on the generated brand kit). Any chance of that coming to PowerPoint too? Making PowerPoint themes by hand is the worst, so anything to alleviate that would be welcome.

Yep, that's very near term on our roadmap. Right now, you can download the Google Slides document that we make and have it work pretty well.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#22
post #18

very cool! what can you disclose about plans for pricing model/revenue? first thing i look for in any startup that I'm about to try/evangelize. i see that "there's no subscription" in the FAQ - so you're like an asset marketplace? suggestion - dont make me signup just to try you out - see if you can bring out at least part of your process from behind your login wall.

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll try to find a way to bring more of our product outside of the login wall.

Creating a brand and getting a style guide is free. We charge in the hundreds-of-dollars range for the agency side of our business.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#23

I like this a lot, I went through it and generated some assets. I ran into a couple of issues though: - I don't trust myself picking colors, fonts, etc, and I'm worried that when I go to buy a UI template or whatever my terrible decision for colors won't be "fixed". I'd much rather pay you to go through this with me based on my inputs and trust your expertise. - For typography, do people really use custom typography?…

Thanks! Glad you like it.

It's funny - we've heard the "I don't trust myself" sentiment often. We want to make you believe that your choices are great (and, most of the time, they are). We've thought about offering to have a designer take a glance at what you've chosen, but don't yet feel confident that it would solve the problem.

And great point! We don't yet have a dark mode setting, but it's something we want to build.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#26
Nit: to me at least, "Never deal with another freelancer" comes off as unnecessarily harsh (even if it resonates with some). I understand the product is targeted to early-stage startups without the budget to hire someone, but it sounds like it's putting down the idea of working with a designer altogether (see "no need to hire a designer"), when you could poise it as complementary to working with a designer eventually if we choose to do so.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#27
"Launch your product without hiring a branding consultant" may be a more accurate way to describe this offering!

I get that this is more about branding than product design. But, I'd like to point out that if you are making a product, someone is doing the design for that product, whether they realize it or not.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#28
FYI, ublock origin blocks track.customer.io which is an alias for open.getparade.com and so the account verification step fails until ublock is disabled. I'd recommend moving to internal tracking rather than using customer.io, just my 2 cents of feedback.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#29
post #12
post #11

I really struggle with design, so one of the main challenges I have launching any product is the UI. But I've been promised these things in the past, and wasted money on them. 99 Designs, Freelancer, ThemeForest (including asking the theme developer for customisations). I've tried them all, and they've never worked. So I approach this fairly sceptically. But I'd love to see it work. Usually the biggest problem is not…

Yeah, UI design is tricky. We haven't solved that yet, but would love to in the long run.

You're getting into "launch your house without hiring an architect" territory there. UI isn't so much tricky as it is an entirely separate discipline, devoted entirely to context, with a ton of thinking already done and ready to be applied at the individual level.

Just having a few off-the-rack workflows that are easy to play with would be helpful.

Re: Launch HN: Parade (YC S20) – Launch your company without hiring a designer

#30
post #24

Looks very interesting, and definitely solves a problem. I wish there was a way to preview some sample designs without having to sign up – NewGlue from Stockholm does this quite well, I think: https://newglue.com

Yeah, that's something we want to improve. Thanks for sharing NewGlue - I like the way they do their example brand too.
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