In 2010, inspired by the success of the mockup tool Balsamiq, I started working on a competitor called jMockups. My original goal was basically to build a Balsamiq clone, but instead of it being downloadable software it would be web-based. I named it after jQuery.

After a while I realized that competing head-on with Balsamiq was a bad idea so I pivoted to building a high fidelity mockup tool – one that would create mockups that looked like real websites instead of sketches – and I renamed the project Lean Designs. Instead of competing with Balsamiq, I’d be competing with tools like Photoshop that a lot of designers use to design sites before building them. And as an added bonus, Lean Designs would also export your high fidelity mockup to HTML and CSS, saving you from having to manually code up the design when you were finished. I was pretty excited by it.

Here’s an early demo of Lean Designs:

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, things did not go well.

I never wound up writing about what went wrong – mostly out of embarrassment – but reading about my mistakes might save of some of you some heartache with your own projects.

First and foremost, Lean Designs didn’t solve a clear pain point for a specific group of users. If you had asked me back then who Lean Designs’s audience was, I would have said something like: it’s for developers who want to design a website without writing HTML/CSS, it’s for designers to create a high fidelity mockup of their websites before coding it, and it’s for everyday people who want to create a simple static website but don’t want to code 😱.

These are three very different usecases and Lean Designs didn’t solve any of them well. For example, for developers and everyday people who want to create a website, having a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) web design tool where every element is absolutely positioned makes it extremely hard to create a well-designed site. I touted on Lean Designs’s homepage how easy it was to create beautiful websites with it, but almost everything created with it looked terrible.

If you asked me which of those use cases was my focus, I probably would have said Lean Designs was a Photoshop replacement for designers to create high fidelity website mockups. But… I am not a designer. And I’ve never used Photoshop to create high fidelity mockups. I read online about how many designers use it, but I had no expertise in the problem I was trying to solve. And if Lean Designs was truly for designers to create high fidelity mockups, why did I build an export to HTML/CSS feature that would never be used by these designers in a production website?

One way to mitigate this is to do customer development: to get on the phone and meet face to face with people in this market to learn about their real problems. I never spoke with anyone in Lean Designs’s target audience to verify my assumptions. This is ironic given that Lean Designs is named after the Lean Startup movement, a big part of which is to do customer development to avoid making incorrect assumptions.

I also didn’t research any of my competitors. I rationalized it by saying to myself that I didn’t want to be influenced by what was currently on the market. To this day I’m still learning about competitors that existed back then that I had no idea about.

I formed jMockups LLC to add an element of seriousness to the project even before the site had launched. That’s $500/year to operate in Massachusettes.

I paid hundreds of dollars for a logo that I never wound up using because after I bought it I realized it resembled a swastika:

When I later renamed the site to Lean Designs, I filed a trademark for it with the help of a local lawyer. He also helped write its Terms of Service. 💸

With all of these administrative things taken care of, I proceeded to spend months building the first version of the product.

I thought I was being innovate by blindly following my vision for the product, but I was being extremely naive.

When I received feedback about jMockups on HackerNews, I took every bit of praise as validation that the product was on the right track. Same thing when I announced the pivot to Lean Designs.

The first version was completely free. I wanted feedback – any feedback – and thought that the best way to do that was to get as many people using it as possible. Feedback from free users can be very misleading; what you really need is feedback from people who will pay.

Eventually I transitioned to a freemium model where you could create a limited number of mockups for free or unlimited for $9 per month. This was a tool that I was aiming at professionals and I charged the same amount as a burrito at Chipotle.

The only marketing I did for it was to create a blog where I only posted about feature updates. I should have been writing – or paying someone to write – content that would be interesting to my target audience (whoever that was).

And for the few people that did use it and did pay, I eagerly implemented almost every feature request in the hope that each one would turn the tide on my failing product.

I was in a mastermind group at the time, but we spent too much time talking about features and not whether the Lean Designs was viable in the first place.

I didn’t pay close attention to metrics nor did I look at what people were actually creating with the site.

Finally, I spent way too much time trying to turn what I knew to be a flop into a successful startup. It’s hard to know sometimes whether an idea is bad or whether you just need to keep pushing, but in Lean Design’s case I kept at it way too long.

After about a year and a half and hundreds of hours spend toiling away on nights and weekends, I stopped accepting new users, put up a notice that it would be shut down in a few months, then killed it.

The upside of my experience with Lean Designs is that I picked up a lot of new technical skills and learned a lot about what not to do which I later applied to Lean Domain Search and other side projects.

Was it worth it? Could I have learned these things by reading blog posts like this one when I was deciding whether to work on Lean Designs? It’s hard to say. I’d like to think so. Maybe some things just have to be learned the hard way.

On that note, if anyone reading finds themselves working on a project with similar issues and is looking for feedback, don’t hesitate to drop me an email.