Jorn van Dijk
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Episodes
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First of Kind · Koen & Jorn: Framer Reloaded
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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. A landing page for Soleio comes back quickly and looks like the others. Asking the chat to make a button blue often fails. The back and forth feels like a walkie-talkie. Newer tools, including V0, now add controls after the chat: click the button, open a popover, and pick a color.
Framer is in the reverse position. A year of AI work is headed into the product in Q1, while the editing controls are already the base, from button color and forms to animation, breakpoints, and how a page looks, feels, and breathes. The plan is to put AI on top so people move faste
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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. They had already sold their first company, Sofa, to Facebook, so selling again did not look appealing, even if a sale might return money to investors. Money was still in the bank, which made quitting odd, because the next step would be starting another company. Koen Bok brought the technology built over the first four years, and websites were where they landed.
Pushing after the point where they should have stopped does not really work. A startup either hits a nerve, so people get excited and start using it, and marketing and the rest of the company can
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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. Touch was the last big innovation in interaction design, an engineer invented it, and years of Flash work shaped how the future of tools looked. The future of design tooling looks like Notion or FigJam, lower fidelity, and the old pitch stopped being believable.
The break showed up over lunch in the summer, while Jorn van Dijk was on leave with a three-week-old, his second child. The pitch that the old direction would still work had run out. A canvas and a pile of technology were already in hand, and stopping was the first question. Three paths sat on the t
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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 happen. Five years ago the goal was triple, triple, double, double. Framer was not tripling after 4 million. Getting stuck at 5 million did not look like a path to a company that could IPO or become the new Adobe.
Venture capital was part of the pressure, and their own ambition to build a significant company was the larger part. Funding works as a forcing function. Without it, founders can grow 20% a year, pay themselves market plus, keep going for a few years, and feel bored later. When a company is not doing well, the investors tend
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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. Desktop software had three interactions with a mouse: click, scroll, and maybe resize. Phones brought 50 overnight, including double tap, triple tap, swipe up, down, left, and right, and tossing the phone around. The team had no tooling for any of it.
The gap stayed part of the culture after the Sofa group left. Facebook's design team pioneered prototyping methods that later became standard at Twitter, Microsoft, and Amazon. The acquisitions were meant to make Facebook a pioneer on design, and playing with the new gestures on a real device
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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. Perplexity and Miro run their whole .com on Framer. Designers and marketers now own the website from front to back, which is the shift the cofounders say they figured out.
Designers do not only draw the site. They build the whole thing and run it with the marketing team. Keeping that ownership, instead of handing the last details to someone else, makes it easier to ship quickly, raise the quality of the site, and hold onto the final decisions. After a handoff, a lot of people are left figuring out the last details.