Short answer: not always. If your runway is tight and you're still finding out whether anyone wants the product, you probably don't need me yet. Once the stakes go up, when you're raising, running ads, or putting the product in front of real paying users, you do. And if you're setting out to build the best product in your category, you need design from day zero. Here's how I'd think about it as the designer founders hire.

When you don't need a designer yet

If money is tight, you're still validating the idea and you don't have many users, try vibe coding it yourself. The goal at this stage isn't a polished product. It's finding out whether there's product market fit at all. An AI-built version is a cheap way to answer that question before you spend on anything else.

I'd rather tell a founder that on a first call than take a project they don't need yet.

When you do

The moment changes when the stakes go up. Usually that's one of three things: you're raising money, you're running ads, or you need real users to actually adopt the product and keep using it.

At that point a vibe-coded product works against you. Investors and users read it as unfinished or not well thought through, even if the idea underneath is strong. You're paying to bring people in, and the first thing they see tells them you didn't take it seriously. That's when you need a good design person, not because the screens need to be prettier, but because the impression now costs you money.

The exception: building the best product in the category

There's one case where the validate-first rule doesn't apply. If you're setting out to build the best product in your space, design matters from the very start, even at zero, before you have a single customer.

That's usually when you already have the money and you're building something meant to be used by a lot of people, or something that defines a category. In that situation the experience is the product. You can't vibe code your way to category-defining and fix the design later, because the design is a big part of why people will choose you over everything else.

AI can do about 70% of the job

I'm not anti-AI. Vibe coding can get you roughly 70% of the way there right now, and that's genuinely useful. The other 30% still needs a human, and it's the part that decides whether the product feels considered or generic. That 30% is where I come in. I wrote more about this in Framer vs vibe coding: the real question is design judgment, not the tool.

What a designer does beyond the screens

Screens are the visible part. Most of the work happens before them. I research the space, analyse competitors and work out which features the product actually needs and which ones it doesn't. Those decisions come from reference research, not from guessing, and they're what keep an MVP small enough to ship.

What founders get wrong when they design it themselves

Founders know their product better than anyone, so they build the features. What's usually missing is the design language: the visuals, the branding, the sense that it all belongs together.

The bigger gap is UX. A feature can be right and still be shown the wrong way. How onboarding works, how pricing is presented, where people drop off and why: these decide whether users stay. And it's not a one-time fix. You keep finding where you're losing people and keep improving it.

What an MVP engagement with me looks like

It depends on what you're building.

For a mobile app, it's usually about a month to design the MVP from scratch. That includes the branding, visuals and logo, premium animations built in code or Rive that your developers can take straight into the build, and the screenshots for the app stores.

For a web app, we start with the functionality you need, then the UX and information architecture, how everything is organised and connected. Then the screens, then the visual layer, and then a phase of exploration and iteration to refine it.

You can see that work on my app design page.

The short version

Still validating, with a tight runway: build it yourself and find out if anyone cares. Raising, running ads, or asking real users to commit: that's when design stops being a nice-to-have. Funded and aiming to build the best product in your category: bring design in from day zero. If you're also preparing to pitch, the pitch deck is usually the next thing investors see. And if you're deciding who to hire, here's how I compare a freelancer, an agency and an in-house designer.