Looks Matter (When It Comes to Software Products)

Imagine you’re a car salesman and there are two models on the floor at the same (or close to the same) price point. The first has a powerful engine, a technical marvel, with cutting-edge engineering and unparalleled performance; but its exterior design is dated, its interior utilitarian. The second model, while not the fastest car on the road, offers a smooth ride, a sleek design, comfortable seats and easy-to-use controls.

Which would be an easier sell? As an engineer by training, I’d probably be drawn to the first… But I know most of my friends (and most other consumers) would bet on design and experience any day. That would certainly explain all the Teslas in Silicon Valley!

In the 2000s, when I was just starting my career building networking and security products, there was an industry-wide focus on intellectual property (IP) and technology defensibility, occasionally at the expense of aesthetic or ease of use. I’ve seen that focus shift over time, giving way to more intuitive design as consumers adapted to the iPhone and officer workers to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Workspace, including easy-to-use products like Drive for storage and Docs and Sheets for real-time collaboration.

Indeed, the new generation of corporate leaders, many of whom grew up in an application-native world – navigating by Apple Maps or making one-click purchases on Amazon – expect to be delighted by products and see it as a key purchasing criterion. As a result, a new breed of user-friendly tech companies is stealing the limelight.

Take Wiz, for example. Fellow cloud-security startup Lacework offered strong technical capabilities, based on years of research and hundreds of millions in venture financing, but Wiz gained a huge market advantage by offering visually appealing design and easy-to-use features. Our own IT team tells us that with Wiz, you just “turn in on” and you are in business. Prioritizing ease of use clearly helped Wiz outpace the competition: Last month, just four years after its 2020 founding, the company reportedly turned down a $23 billion acquisition offer from Alphabet, planning instead to pursue milestones of “$1 billion in ARR and an IPO,” per a note sent to employees by the CEO.

Similarly, our friends at Abnormal Security have taken a sleepy market in email security and jazzed it up, applying a delightful user experience to uncover hard-to-track email phishing attacks targeting security engineers. The company’s customers rave about its fast implementation, ease of use and user experience. Like Wiz, Abnormal Security, too, has seen remarkable success in an otherwise slow market – raising a $250 million Series D funding round that values the company at $5.1 billion just last month. 

These days, abundant venture-capital investment and lower costs of building software have led to more and more companies in many high-tech categories. Of course, generative AI will only make it cheaper and easier to build new software in the years to come. I predict most future applications will look like workflows and dashboards wrapped around a foundation model. When that happens, product design and quick time-to-value for customers will become the core differentiators for many software companies: not just checking a box, but an existential focus.

So, if you are building an enterprise or application software product, here are three things to keep in mind:

#1: Know, and delight, your end user.

Who is actually going to use your product? Identify the end user, embrace them and make sure that they’re delighted by the product. The economic buyer might have the budgetary authority to sign on the dotted line, but it won’t do you any good to go to them directly. Make sure the end user likes what they see, it will work wonders.

Figma took this approach by prioritizing the end user experience in creating design software tools that were highly intuitive and collaborative, much more so than those offered by incumbents like Adobe. Figma’s popularity among users catapulted it to the top of the industry, an ascent capped by Adobe’s planned $20 billion acquisition of the company (later abandoned in 2023 amid regulatory pressures).

Postman*, which creates API management tools that help over 20 million developers share, test and document APIs, also did this very effectively, recognizing the importance of making their product as efficient and easy-to-use as possible, while also religiously soliciting user feedback to continuously improve. Compared to Swagger, which was another API design and testing company before its acquisition by SmartBear, Postman’s interface was significantly more intuitive and flexible, making it easier for teams to collaborate and driving viral adoption.

Postman’s highly intentional approach of creating flexible products that delight the end user persists today, which not only helps with selling, but preserves valuable internal resources: time and money. As the company’s co-founder and CEO Abhinav Asthana wrote in 2021, “When I was building Postman v1, I chose not to use fancy frameworks or a complex architecture. I wanted to use the bare minimum technology that I could completely understand and know that it would work before adding anything further. We continue to follow that same rule today and encourage our teams to only implement things in which they have full confidence. This measured approach helps us ship production-ready product releases quickly and continuously, rather than spending time on prototypes.”

#2: Product design drives offense. Your tech roadmap builds a defensive moat.

Offense and defense are both important in any sustainable business. For a software company, defense is building IP, because you’re worried about a large company coming after you. But you should play offense first by prioritizing good design and letting customers get time to value in minutes, on their own terms. Once you play offense and get your products in customers’ hands, then you can build defense by building more modules and driving adoption in your user base.

A great example of how to sequence offense and defense is Gong*, a revenue-intelligence platform that helps sales teams understand customers and prospects better. When the company was first founded in 2015, many sellers were reliant on traditional CRMs like Salesforce to track customer engagement and communications, which required significant customization to collect customer insight. In the absence of that customization, users were forced to spend significant time and effort trying to discern takeaways.

Gong played offense by making its platform easy to use, with intuitive design and a simple onboarding process to reduce friction and increase adoption. And as its user base grew, with 500 customers by 2019, they played defense by adding more advanced features, including its Deal Intelligence and Revenue Intelligence products. Another offense and defense success story is that of Airtable, which first delighted a broad base of users by creating a powerful, customizable alternative to the traditional spreadsheet format. After Airtable started to gain traction, their team started to add more advanced features, creating a strong defensive moat against competitors.

#3: Well-designed products drive user adoption, but you still need to sell!

You may have hundreds of developers using your product or API, but you still need sales to convince the VP of engineering to adopt it. Most software products need to be sold! Incentivize your sales team to delight the end user, convince the economic buyer and gain mass adoption.

Notion understood the balance between building and selling. The company’s tools are famously simple, easy-to-use and collaborative, which helped to attract a robust initial user base of people who wanted to become more organized and productive. The Notion team also saw the value of building community around the product, but they knew they needed to build a sales organization to grow–and they needed to sell and market the right way. As Notion CEO and co-founder Ivan Zhao shared on a 2021 SaaStr podcast, “[Our] B2C plus B2B motion gives us a lot of sales efficiency. But in order for us to pull off this motion, we have to have a strong consumer brand, not just a business brand.” 

Consider MongoDB, too. Developers, data scientists and other MongoDB users love its flexibility. Like Notion, MongoDB doggedly focused on the end user in its early days, creating tools and features to delight its rapidly growing developer user base. But they didn’t stop there. Instead, the company built a robust sales team to convince economic buyers–chief technology officers, chief information officers and VPs of engineering–to pay for it at the enterprise level, which helped the company outpace its competitor set, including large incumbents like Oracle and Microsoft.

In conclusion…

These days, looks matter in the software industry. Users expect to be delighted. Don’t lose sight of that reality: all the technological innovation in the world won’t make up for poor design and usability. No matter how impressive your tech is, if your product doesn’t look good and it’s not easy to use, it’s dead in the water.

By adopting time to value and engaging (and delighting) the end user earlier in the sales cycle, you can get a head start in building a business with staying power. Don’t forget to sequence in aesthetic, ease of use and elements to draw in the end user, because you can always build deeper product moats downstream.

*Denotes a Battery portfolio company. For a full list of all Battery investments, please click here.

The information contained herein is based solely on the opinion of Dharmesh Thakker and nothing should be construed as investment advice. This material is provided for informational purposes, and it is not, and may not be relied on in any manner as, legal, tax or investment advice or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund or investment vehicle managed by Battery Ventures or any other Battery entity. The views expressed here are solely those of the author.

The information above may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or expectations. Predictions, opinions and other information discussed in this publication are subject to change continually and without notice of any kind and may no longer be true after the date indicated. Battery Ventures assumes no duty to and does not undertake to update forward-looking statements.