Smash Notes

Back to Koen & Jorn: Framer Reloaded, with Koen Bok & Jorn van Dijk.

Why Do Startup Websites Look Better Than Seven Years Ago?

Soleio credits Framer with a handprint on the aesthetic, the language, and the medium of the web. Old startup websites were terrible seven years ago, and they are awesome today. The gap is night and day, and people can sense and feel the aesthetic of Framer Motion and a Framer website.

The arc runs through two acts. Act One was five years of working on a prototyping tool that helped designers make ideas real, try things out, and share them with others. The prototyping work hit a glass ceiling, and a really difficult crucible moment forced a decision to pivot. Act 2 was a 10-year overnight success of building the premier website builder, the best way to build amazing websites. 55% of YC companies use Framer.

Grokipedia·Framer Motion·Framer

Transcript

Koen & Jorn: Framer Reloaded ·

First of Kind

More from this episode

  1. How Do Designers Run Sites on Framer?Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk call Framer a web design platform that design-forward companies use to produce their entire marketing sites.
  2. Why Did Phones Break Desktop Design Tools?Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk say Sofa joined Facebook while Chris Cox and others were still choosing companies to acquire so Facebook could lead on design.
  3. Why Did Framer's Revenue Stall at Five Million?Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk say early Framer revenue reached a million, then three, four, and five million, and then growth slowed, the opposite of what had to…
  4. Why Does Koen Bok Say Design Tools Will Look Like Notion?Koen Bok says he and Jorn van Dijk were wrong about high-fidelity tools. They started Framer convinced that design needed more of them.
  5. Why Did Framer Pivot Instead of Selling?Jorn van Dijk says the lunch came down to three options: quit and give the money back, try to sell what was left after expenses, or pivot.
  6. Why Can't AI Make a Website Button Blue?Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk say a chat tool can make a landing page fast, and speed is the main advantage, but the page looks generic.

People

More answers like this

More with Soleio

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.