Photo Credit: x-ray delta one

3 Things That Every Startup Has to Build

8 years ago, soon after the high school, I’ve worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken for couple of months. Tough job to start a career, but I really wanted to buy an awesome guitar and I needed money for that. First day wasn’t particularly good. I was definitely the slowest, most confused, KFC employee in the history. Customers were going mad, so one of my supervisors took me for a Face to Face meeting and said “Marcin, I don’t know if you really understand the meaning of words fast food…let me explain: it means that food must be served in a really fast way”.

As mean as it was, I got it and survived inside the KFC the next 6 months.

I took this miserable life lesson with me to both: the User Experience and the Entrepreneurial world. I’m always deeply thinking about the expected outcome that guarantee success and the real meaning of the situation. For User Experience Design the outcome is always a great, efficient, product. For entrepreneurs… well that’s a little bit more complicated.

I’ve learnt (and believe me…it took me some time!) that, on the very basic level, every startup must do only 3 things to survive. Three things that define the meaning of a startup, just as serving food quickly, defines the existence of a fast food.

1. Build an amazing team
2. Build a great product loved & desired by customers
3. Achieve significant, sustainable, growth

As far as I know, that’s it. Only 3 things!

At UXPin we spent months talking to you (our customers), observing your reactions in the social media, changes in metrics… and we were iterating, like crazy, on the product. Finally, thanks to your amazing feedback, we’ve started to grow.

When you know that your company actually works, that’s an amazing, powerful, feeling. When you see the growing satisfaction of customers and the growing revenue, that’s makes you jump high in the air!

And we’re just having our best month in the history. February was the previous best month and before that – January. That’s our sustainable growth.

The number of paying customers will be, again, more than 30% higher than in the previous month.

In fact, we’ve sold more accounts last week than in the first 6 months of the company.

But that’s not what’s most important today. Company had the best week and the best month in the history, while we (Marcin Treder and Marcin Kowalski) are in the Silicon Valley, working on the next step for the company (lots of legal and financial stuff ). That’s the clear sign that we have in place the third factor that every startups need to succeed – great team.

So here’s to you! The greatest startup team ever!

• Paweł Neubauer
• Kamil Zieba
• Mateusz Makosiewicz
• Jacek Złowocki
• Maciej Wojdyr
• Markus Zwick

Without the right team startup means nothing, just as without loved product and sustainable growth.

/Marcin Treder, UXPin CEO

Here’s the deal: we believe in providing valuable, inspirational content to our readers. To make you guys UX design superheroes – simple as that. And there’s a moment in a startup’s life when you begin to feel that the company belongs more to the users and the community than to the founders:) But that’s a good thing! It means that people find your work meaningful.

Sooo, we decided there should be more room for your input and that’s why we invite you all to become UXPin’s guest bloggers. If you’ve got some cool blog post material you’d like to share with the UX community, send to guestblogger@uxpin.com:

• Title and abstract of the post (pdf format, please);
• A short bio note about yourself. This will help people get to know you and promote your name and/or company!

If there’s “chemistry”, we’ll contact you and you’ve got yourself a publication! Know someone who is up to the task? Share the call for papers!

Love, UXPin.

UXPin is certainly the fastest growing design tool on the market*. Our team updates the app every couple of days to bring you even better user experience!

This time we brought to you, much anticipated, auto-alignment and distribute feature. No time to be wasted with these awesome little friends. You can quickly make your elements aligned and equally distributed, so your design ideas will be expressed in a clear and uncluttered, way.

Take a look at the short video:

That’s one of many simple improvements of your design workflow, that can save you valuable minutes and lots of stress, every day . More – on the way!

Enjoy!

*One of our competitors (which we really respect!) recently announced that to catch up with our “responsive prototyping” feature, they will postpone launch of new version of their tool till June. That’s not really lean development, isn’t it?

/Marcin Treder

New Set of Icons for your Mobile Applications

UXPin – The UX Design App has just been updated again. The title of The Most Valued Tool Voted by UX Professionals just made us more hungry for success. I don’t want to sound cocky and all, but we really aim at creating the best tool possible. The only way to do that goes through constant improvement.

UXPin exists to help people realize the importance of User Experience Design, popularize it and make it more approachable and easy to do for just about anybody working on web or mobile applications.

We live this dream each and every day

I’m always saying that we wouldn’t even exist if no for our friends and this update is actually all about them and their help. Thanks to the amazing people at Pixle, which skills I absolutely admire, we’ve just enriched UXPin App with hundreds of new icons. Say goodbye to searching for icons outside of UXPin. You have everything in the right place.

Pixle are well known, all over the world, as creators of Foldify App. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Gesture Icons for Mobile Apps

The second part of the update is the collection of gesture icons that you can use while documenting your mobile apps. The gesture icons describe every touch-interaction you could ever dream about. Take a look at them here:

Gesture icons can actually strongly improve communication value of your documentation by visualizing requirements that usually remain hidden. To give you an example:

The icons are free to use in UXPin of course, but if you want to use them in your products you can buy each set at an amazingly nonsignificant price: $9.99! Subway Icons Set and Gesture Set are waiting for you. Enjoy!

/Marcin Treder

Folks organizing Convey UX Conference created a survey aiming at listing the tools most valued by UX Professionals.

I’m extremely proud to say, that UXPin was chosen The Most Valued UX Tool in the Wireframing Category. Hurray!

We got less votes than our respected competitors from Axure, Balsamiq and Omnigraffle (which is perfectly reasonable – we’re just starting!), but our average score was much higher. Check out the summary.

It shows two interesting things:

1. We’ve started to widely chase most renown of our competitors, leaving behind less known tools
2. UX professionals value quality of our solution higher than most popular applications

What is just great, we can see that tendency in our stats. We already know that February is our best month in history and sales are going to outgrow January by 30%! Take a look at our weekly growth stats. Sales are going nuts!

I’m so proud of my team it cannot be easily expressed. I feel privileged to work with you guys!

On behalf of the whole company I’d like to thank you all for your support and all the kind words. Thank you!

ps. We’re (Marcin Treder & Marcin Kowalski) currently in the Silicon Valley. Follow the story on my blog: marcin.is

UXPin Update: Windows Phone 8, Android & iPad SVG Wireframing UI Elements

Great deal of the UX design world still discusses our Responsive Web Design Prototyping Solution (+100 tweets, +100 Fb likes in 24 hours! Thank you!), but we’re not taking a break. Yesterday afternoon we’ve pushed 120 new wireframing UI elements to our servers. You can use completely new iPad, Android and Windows 8 wireframing library. Today we’ve also added two browser elements that might help you create your wireframes and interactive prototypes.

Thanks to SVG format our UI elements are not loosing its quality while resizing. They just look great and we sincerely hope you’ll design stunning apps with them

This update made me a little bit nostalgic. I remember that couple of years ago I was getting ready to design my first Android App. I spent half a day browsing through dozens of websites with wireframing stencils. When I’ve finally found an Android library, its quality was way below my standards. We don’t want to serve you this kind of experience. Expect our Wireframing UI to grow further in upcoming weeks.

Take a look at the newest update of Wireframing UI Elements Library:

(more…)

Jump high and catch the growth! Photo Credit: Emery_Way via Compfight cc

Hack the Growth! Growth Hacking in UXPin

In his famous blog post Startup = Growth, Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, said: “A startup is a company designed to grow fast.”. Planing and executing a growth strategy is the straight way to business haven – explains mr Graham and damn… I couldn’t agree more.

Creating a product is a constant endeavor to please current customers and conquer hearts&minds of new people. It should be planned, precisely executed and measured. It’s a non-stop job. You just can’t have a rest for five minutes. It’s a race.

“A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month.” /Paul Graham

At UXPin, inspired by our great advisors, we measure and plan our growth strategy per week. We try to keep our growth rate in sales high, so we precisely plan our marketing strategy (90% of which is to create meaningful content for all of you!) and constantly improve our product – introducing new features, or improving existing – almost every week.

Does it work?

Yes! Since we’ve reached the traction, back in August 2012, our average weekly growth of sales is 7%! We’re keeping our growth rate healthy (around 5% weekly is usually considered awesome for SaaS companies) and we’ve just nailed our weekly record of sales.

Last week we’ve reached almost 8% of weekly growth and we’ve exceeded our former record of sales by 41%!

I’d like to take this moment and thank all of you – our customers, supporters and friends. Our dream of making UX easier for web&mobile teams, comes true thanks to you.

I cannot thank enough our amazing team. Working with these guys is a privilege. They simply rock!

• Marcin Kowalski – our COO&CFO (@hefi_tv)
• Kamil Zieba – CPO (@ziebak)
• Paweł Neubauer – CTO (@bauerpl)
• Markus Zwick – Customer Succes Couch (@ZwickMarkus)
• Jacek Złowocki – Programmer (@jzlowocki)
• Maciej Wojdyr – Programmer (@mwojdyr)

/Marcin Treder, UXPin CEO

Photo Credit: star5112 via Compfight cc

Cloud App working, even if you’re offline

Imagine this super scary situation: You’re working in you favorite cloud app (let say it’s a wireframing app). Suddenly…. BAM, you lost your Internet connection. The app stopped working and most probably you lost your data.

That’s scary, right?

We thought so.

You know well that ‘shit happens’. You might lose the connection, or the server might be temporary unavailable. That may kill all the benefits of a cloud app. Losing your data is unacceptable.

Having this problem in mind we’ve used local storage (all thanks to our wizard of programming Jacek) to prevent any data loss in case of lack of connection to the cloud.

If you’ll suddenly lose connection to the server, we’ll save your data locally (on your computer) and we’ll let you further use UXPin until the connection will come back. Next time you’ll connect to the server, we’ll synchronize your local data with the server.

Magic? Just a little bit, the rest is hard work.

Check out the scheme below:

With UXPin you’re safe, even if offline.

Update

Due to extreme popularity of this post (thank you so much for all the upvotes on Hackernews, likes etc.), I asked author of this feature to guide you through the meanders of his solution:

“Unfortunately our solution is not generic enough to talk about it in details But the general idea is quite simple. We use HTML5-called localStorage object to store changes in user’s projects locally and while the connection is on (or when it comes back), our synchronization mechanism just grabs local data and sends it to server.”/Jacek Złowocki