Mariana Aguiar of Desygner: 5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS

You don’t need to be alone in the market: You don’t need to be doing something that no one has done before if you are addressing a big market. We’ve always had competitors who had much more money than us, but it didn’t stop us from being in the game. The important thing is to find points where you can win and differentiate yourself within the landscape.

As part of my series about the “5 Things, You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mariana Aguiar.

Desygner Founder and CPO Mariana Aguiar has 15 years of experience in advertising, PR and marketing. Her experience in digital marketing, social media and international branding assisted Desygner to build a solution with the marketers’ interest in mind. As part of her vast work experience, Mariana also worked in advertising, having franchise groups as clients, which gave her deep insight on their marketing localization needs.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I would consider myself somewhat of a global citizen. I am Brazilian, but I moved to Australia in 2008. I intended to stay for six months. Those six months turned into 13 years, so I ended up becoming an Aussie too! I now live in Lisbon, Portugal.

My professional roots lie in marketing. I started my career in advertising in Brazil, eventually landing in Australia. During my time in Australia, I got the chance to work with an array of global brands, including the Australian fashion label aussieBum managing their B2B partners, which included Harrods, Selfridges, Kadewe, Magasin du Nord, and Bijenkorf.

After a while, I realized my time in the corporate world was up and I decided to take a leap of faith into entrepreneurship. After a few startup attempts, my business partners and I launched Desygner in January 2016. From the moment we released the minimum viable product (MVP) into the market, we knew the traction and market fit were there, we just needed to work to make it a stellar product.

We did this by hiring key technological leads to help us build out the solution. We then developed key points of differentiation between the tools that were already in the market and us (such as the PDF import feature, brand restrictions, and powerful iOS and Android apps). Lastly, we added monetization to the platform to invest more into building an even better product.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led you to think of the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

Rather than an aha moment, it was a series of frustrations with the design process as a whole that led us to envision creating a solution.

At the time, my fellow co-founders and I were working on a different business and found that when we needed to post something on social media, change the prices of an existing advert, or create a new version of something that was already designed, it was never easy. We would have to go through a series of back and forth correspondence with designers and still wouldn’t get what we needed.

An excellent example of this was my first client in advertising: Ford Motor Company. A lot of the work we did for them was to change prices and images in adverts. It was frustrating for designers to do these simple edits, as it was non-creative work. It was also expensive for the client. I knew we needed to create a design solution that also had professionals in mind. I realized that non-designers did not have the software or knowledge to customize materials, and brands had no way to allow others to edit their content safely. We decided to change that, and Desygner was born.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

We started Desygner without venture capitalist investment, which means a greater risk and more challenges to face as a bootstrapped company.

We were a new business entering the market and the competition had more cash and hype than we did, so our first few years we faced rejection from investors and partners alike, who were quick to insist we would not make it.

We invested our own money (and some from our contacts) and the company was not profitable for quite some time. We had to run lean, not take salaries, and find other ways to pay the bills.

Even when we launched the site, Google autocorrected our name to “designer,” so we didn’t show up as a search result!

It seemed like an unbearable challenge at times, but there is something very powerful about having a group of people with a common goal. You can always count on each other to persevere through difficult times. Even solo entrepreneurs should surround themselves with some community to feel that support.

So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

Desygner is now an established company with 20 million users worldwide. We have 60 thousand businesses operating on the platform, with major corporate clients such as Keller Williams, BBC, Techstars, and Amazon. While we now have millions in revenue, we’ve maintained a bootstrap mindset, reinvesting profits right back into the business. We started as five people working in a living room, and today we are a team of 70 people working globally.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

When we launched, I thought it was a good idea to send every user who signed up (1,000 a day at the time) an email from my actual email address. Then, I felt the need to respond to every answer, even the most absurd ones.

Some customers would send me a prayer, others a lot of swear words — but some would also send valuable feedback. The funny part is that my email hasn’t changed since, and from time to time, I still get emails from people who are cleaning their inbox and decide to answer me. I once had a user apologizing for being rude to me five years prior.

The key lesson is that it’s great to get feedback from people; read the comments if you will, but do it for a concise period of time, or only periodically. To get a better overview of your users’ opinions, there are great survey and analytics tools to do that. But that experience also taught me not to be afraid of speaking to users directly, which I still often do.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

There are two sides to Desygner: one targeting small businesses and one serving big companies.

With small businesses, we have always been focused on removing roadblocks. Desygner was the first design platform to have iOS and Android apps, the first to have the ability to import any PDF file into the platform, and we are about to bring over 100 million Shutterstock images to our platform. We know small business owners have too much on their plates to learn how to design, so we make it easy for them by automating as much as possible.

With bigger companies, we know design solutions need to be able to scale, which means; designs shouldn’t only be available to the marketing and design teams, but for every company user involved. For example, we work with the biggest real estate franchise in the world, Keller Williams, who uses Desygner to make customizable marketing materials accessible to 200,000 of their agents.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them thrive and not “burn out”?

Don’t sweat the small stuff — or even the big stuff! A lot of burnout comes from over-thinking situations. As a business, you will sometimes lose users, hire the wrong people, or not get investors on board that you want, but that’s okay. You can move forward regardless and still have an amazing business even when things don’t go how you envision them going. The hard times will make you and your business stronger.

Also, enjoy the ride! The little moments are the big moments. I’ve concluded that we need to celebrate more often, even when things are not perfect.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

As a public figure, Seth Godin was an inspiration to me. Ask any entrepreneur and they will tell you that amassing capital in the startup stage can be daunting. At the time of our launch, we were not getting the investment we needed, so I emailed Seth asking about a partnership and telling him about our journey. He emailed me back with a copy of his book, “The Bootstrapper Bible,” and it was just the encouragement I needed at the time.

Okay thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app or software currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?

We currently have 20 million users and 60,000 business subscribers worldwide.

1. Time to market: We did our research and due diligence to determine that people and businesses were looking for this solution. We also realized a tool not made for mobile was not a solution, so we were the world’s first cross-platform design tool. We were in front of app users before any of our competitors.
2. SEO, ASO, and Word of Mouth: We used a multi-channel approach to get the word out, including SEO and ASO (app search optimization), blogger testimonials, and early adopter corporate clients to provide qualified feedback and a testing ground to make us better. Without much of a marketing budget, we focused on optimizing the website as much as possible for search, while publishing content that was on-demand on the web, and using forums like Quora and Product Hunt to inform people about Desygner.
3. Internationalization: We got ahead of our marketing by launching before we were 100% ready and got in front of an international audience right away by going into larger markets. We translated our website and apps from the very beginning, and we were the first option for online design in Brazil, Mexico, and Russia.

What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?

We run a self-service subscription model for the business-to-consumer market and enterprise deals for big companies. We’ve tried advertising and selling content within the platform, but it didn’t seem to be a need for the customer.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app or a SaaS? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. When to abandon a bad idea: Before launching Desygner, I launched another product that I had to keep pushing my friends to try out; they weren’t engaging on their own. If the App or SaaS solution you are offering receives zero interest from people, no amount of marketing will make it work.
2. The sooner you get clients or users, the better: It can be uncomfortable to sell or launch your solution right off the bat, but we chose to do this as early as possible with Desygner. Once we had users and clients, we had more accountability with our team. We could see the need in the market and help real people to solve design problems.
3. Success & web traffic compounds over time. Building online success takes time and effort, but it’s cumulative. The more downloads we had from the app stores, the more our app was displayed at the top of the search bar, which would then drive more downloads. The more our site was found on Google, the more people used it and linked to it, which led to more search results from Google. When it comes to marketing a solution with smaller budgets, go with long-lasting strategies that keep paying off over time. We didn’t have a big marketing budget, so we invested more in content & SEO than social media, and it worked.
4. You don’t need to be alone in the market: You don’t need to be doing something that no one has done before if you are addressing a big market. We’ve always had competitors who had much more money than us, but it didn’t stop us from being in the game. The important thing is to find points where you can win and differentiate yourself within the landscape.
5. Hiring and designing a team: Your team is everything. We were a group of 5 people with complementary skill sets. As we started to hire more people, we continued to try and find people who could do what we were not able to do.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

It would be the Kill Perfectionism movement. The problem with perfectionism is that it stops you from getting started or moving; It’s defeatist that way. The go hard or go home mentality kills progress. Let’s instead show up consistently and do the best we can at that moment. Even if it’s far from perfect, it will compound.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Mariana Aguiar’s LinkedIn
Desygner Instagram
Desygner LinkedIn
Desygner Twitter
Desygner Facebook

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!