Table of Contents
- From UX designer to design founder
- Making money as a solo UX designer (before you "build a startup")
- The mistakes that cost new design founders the most
- 1. Hiding your idea like it's gold
- 2. Spending money before you have a customer
- 3. Perfecting a website nobody can see
- 4. Not getting paid upfront
- The myths that are keeping UX designers stuck
- 1. Digital nomad life is the dream
- 2. "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life"
- 3. Overnight success is a real thing
- What makes a strong design founding team
- Imposter syndrome doesn't go away
- The gap is smaller than you think
Do not index
Read time: under 9 minutes
From UX designer to design founder
At some point, you started doing the math.
Hours spent shipping features you didn't believe in. Salary that hasn't moved in two years. A manager who keeps saying "not yet" to the promotion. And somewhere in the back of your head, a quiet voice asking: what if I just... did this myself?
So you Google "how to start a design business". You read three articles. You get excited. You buy a domain. You spend four hours picking a font for your agency logo.
And then nothing happens.
I've been there. Every UX designer who's ever thought about going independent has wasted time on exactly the wrong things before touching thing that matters.
In a livestream, Chris sat down with two design founders who've actually done it — Nick Zechner (co-founder of a venture-backed startup, relocated to Croatia to run it, now running his own design studio) and Wyatt Feaster (former senior product designer at Etsy, founder of multiple companies, currently building Rally, a QA tool for designers) — to get brutally honest about what it actually takes to build a startup as a UX designer.
Let’s dive deeper!
👉 The insight in this blog traces back to a thoughtful conversation with Nik and Wyatt — here’s the full discussion:
Making money as a solo UX designer (before you "build a startup")
Everyone wants to build the next AI unicorn. Nobody wants to hear the actual answer. The actual answer is: start with what you already know how to do.
Wyatt, who's spent a decade in design and built multiple companies, is refreshingly blunt about this:
"The easiest thing to do is just whatever you're getting paid for at work — do it outside of work. But no, everybody wants to build an AI app. Everybody wants to build the next unicorn. But that's just potentially not as realistic as where you are now unless you have those chops."
The smarter path looks like a ladder:
- Service (freelance, use your existing skills)
- Automated product (SaaS, templates, digital goods)
- Productized service (same work, defined scope, repeatable)
Most UX designers skip straight to step three. That's how you burn through your savings building a product nobody validated before you made rent.
Nick's story is instructive. He didn't launch a startup on day one. He created a guide about prompting AI — because it was a problem he had — shared it on LinkedIn, it went viral, and people bought it.
"I shared it not because I wanted to make money, but because it was a problem for me myself, for other designers. People loved it. It went viral on LinkedIn. Now I charge a little bit of money and people are still interested."
That's it. Identify a real problem. Share your solution. See if anyone cares. Charge for it if they do.
There's also a smarter version of this: look at what you've already built at work. The internal processes, the frameworks, the Notion docs your team swears by. That's your starting point.
The mistakes that cost new design founders the most
Every person on that livestream had made these. Aggressively. Here's the full list.
1. Hiding your idea like it's gold
Nobody is going to steal your idea. Seriously. There are thousands of good ideas that never get built because the person holding them was too precious to share.
Ideas without execution are worth nothing. And the process of sharing your idea is how you refine it. Every pitch, every reaction, every confused face in the audience is feedback that sharpens what you're building.
If you can't communicate it and get people's buy-in, good luck building it.
2. Spending money before you have a customer
This one is brutal because it feels productive. You're buying the microphone. You're upgrading the software. You're investing in the setup. But you haven't spoken to a single potential customer yet.
Wyatt learned this the hard way with an SEO agency:
"I spent money hiring an SEO agency to do stuff before I even sunk my teeth into it — because I was impatient and lazy and didn't feel like learning it at the time."
Don't hire for a role you've never done yourself. You won't know how to screen for it, you won't know if you're getting ripped off, and you'll probably hire the wrong person twice before figuring out what you actually needed.
The rule: run to your first customer as fast as possible. Everything else is noise until someone pays you.
3. Perfecting a website nobody can see
Nick has done this one "over and over again":
"Building out a perfect website, changing it again. In the meantime, five people saw it. When I started out freelancing, some new customers hadn't even seen my website. They don't care. They just know — hey, this dude says you're a good designer. Let's work together."
Chris has been running UX Playbook on Squarespace for four years and hasn't rebuilt it. Because the priority is delivering value, not looking impressive to other designers.
4. Not getting paid upfront
Nick's closing line on this topic deserves to be taped somewhere visible:
"Try to get paid before doing the job. At least 50% of it. Asking for it upfront also shows professionalism — they know what they're doing. And it will save you so many headaches in the beginning."
With small projects, there's a real chance you won't get paid at all if you don't ask for it first. Asking upfront doesn't make you look desperate. It makes you look like someone who's done this before.
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The myths that are keeping UX designers stuck
1. Digital nomad life is the dream
Wyatt sold his house, went all in on consulting, and went to Bali to build. Here's the honest version of how that went:
"It's a lot more challenging to be effective when you're moving around place to place than I probably thought going into it."
Nick calls it "maintenance mode." You can keep existing clients happy while traveling. What you can't do is grow. Because growth requires focus, routine, and the cognitive bandwidth to think clearly — all things that disappear when you're spending 40% of your brain deciding where to eat dinner in a city you've never been to.
The laptop-on-the-beach photo is a lie. You take it. Then you immediately run to the AC because there's sand in your keyboard and the glare is unbearable.
If you want to travel and work, go slow. One place for months, not 24 cities in 12 weeks.
2. "If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life"
Wyatt dismantles this one cleanly:
"Once the honeymoon phase is over of something you love doing — it's still a business. There are still days where you just don't want to work on it at all."
Even Nick, who genuinely loves what he does and thinks about retirement with actual dread, admits that kids get bored playing with Lego all day. Everything feels like work sometimes. That's not a sign you chose wrong. It's just Tuesday.
3. Overnight success is a real thing
The ones that look like overnight success almost never are. Figma took roughly seven or eight years to find product-market fit. Lovable's explosive growth followed years of skill-building, hiring, and iteration.
Nick says it best:
"People severely overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in 10 years."
The game is slow. Compounding is real but it's not fast. If you're one year in and not where you want to be, that's not failure — that's just the timeline being honest with you.
What makes a strong design founding team
Skills are learnable. Alignment is not.
Nick's framework for this is simple: everyone on the founding team needs to be pointed at the same thing.
"Skills can be learned. But if you don't really want to build a rocket — you probably will have a bad time as a founder."
The fights that kill startups aren't about strategy. They're about ego, about whose idea it was, about who isn't pulling their weight. Those fights happen when people aren't aligned on the mission. When they are aligned, every disagreement becomes a conversation about how to build the rocket.
Wyatt adds persistence and humility to the list — the willingness to take a hit for the team even when it wasn't your fault, because someone has to be the bigger person.
And Chris frames it as the most human version of the question: can you actually build something hard with this person for five to ten years? Not can they code. Not do they have the right credentials. Can you trust them when things get genuinely difficult?
"Skills and competencies can get picked up along the way. But can you build something for the next 5 to 10 years with this person? If you can't, it doesn't really matter."
Imposter syndrome doesn't go away
Every designer going independent deals with this. Every single one. Wyatt is honest about it in a way that's genuinely refreshing:
"I don't think it ever goes away completely. Every time you're trying to improve, you're always doing something you've never done before. Some days it's really high, some days it's low — it's just learning how to manage it day to day."
The reason it never fully disappears is actually a good sign. It means you're constantly pushing into unfamiliar territory. The moment imposter syndrome is gone, you've probably stopped growing.
Nick has a practical tool for the bad days:
"I look back into my journal. I look back at the things I did this month. Look at the achievements — not as a stat or a medal — but just me personally, even if it's just making breakfast every day. And that helps a lot."
For Chris, the shift happened through desperation. Not the romantic kind — the actual, back-against-the-wall kind. He calls it being "sick and tired of being sick and tired":
"You are patient, and then you've just become impatient because there's nothing else you can do. It's this act of desperation where you're just like — if it isn't going to happen to me, I'm going to make it myself."
That's not motivational poster material. That's just what it feels like when someone finally moves.
One more thing that's deeply underrated: having people in your corner who understand the specific kind of hard it is to build something. Not your parents. Not your friends who think a startup is something you do on the weekend. People who've been in the same ugly place and kept going anyway.
Nick frames it around co-founders, but it applies to any tight circle:
"When sh*t goes downwards, you just need someone who understands you. Even if you have a partner or family or friends — they don't know how you feel when a big client pulls out or an employee quits. But a co-founder does."
The gap is smaller than you think
Nick, Wyatt, and Chris have all made every mistake in this blog, and they all kept going. Not because they had some magical resilience gene, but because the alternative — working for someone else's vision for another year, another five years — became less acceptable than the discomfort of figuring it out.
That's really what it comes down to. Not passion, not hustle, not some secret framework. Just getting sick and tired of being sick and tired, and deciding that if something is going to get built, it might as well be yours.
Start with what you know. Share what you're building. Get 50% upfront. Find one person who gets it. The rest is just reps.
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