Founder Fridays: Most founders get design wrong with Brian Lovin, Campsite & Anastasia Crew, Notion

Design isn’t just “coat of paint”—it’s a business lever tied to customer feedback, product strategy, and distribution. Brian Lovin’s through line runs from early tinkering with user customization (writing CSS for Neopets profiles) to building tools that make teams collaborate and iterate faster, and the consistent lesson is that defensibility comes less from features and more from a story people want to join.

Lovin traces his interest in software to a feedback loop: build something, watch how people use it, then refine. A music distribution side project sharpened that instinct into product thinking—he stopped caring as much about the music itself and focused on the experience of discovery and downloading. That work became his portfolio and opened the door to his first product design job, even though he didn’t realize “product design” was a formal role until late in college.

Campsite grew out of a specific design culture he saw at Facebook: Pixel Cloud, an internal tool that made past experiments visible and enabled a remix-style timeline of progress. The goal wasn’t to copy a tool, but to externalize the working environment—visibility, iteration, and shared learning—for design teams. Lovin started by trying to build something similar internally at GitHub, then shifted to a public side project. He shared early, gathered interest through a waitlist, and moved full-time once momentum appeared.

Iteration followed a tight rhythm: early on, any feedback mattered—bug reports and messages were signals that people cared. He described a weekly cadence of customer calls early in the week, followed by focused building and testing later, repeating until the product matched how early adopters wanted to use it. That approach also shaped his view of what founders and PMs often get wrong: many treat design as aesthetics only. While visual polish builds maturity and trust, the bigger value is design’s role in customer conversations, strategy, and how the product actually works.

Balancing speed with craft is possible, he argues, because apps rely on a limited set of UI primitives. The key is building composable components so teams don’t reinvent basic interactions each time. That “good by default” foundation lets teams move quickly without sacrificing tactile clarity.

Campsite’s product direction also illustrates the difference between building and adoption. After a year, leaders liked it but individual contributors hesitated to post work-in-progress. The company pivoted toward a more general team communication tool, but Lovin emphasized that distribution and switching costs are a separate battle—especially when competing with platforms like Notion.

At Notion, he describes the challenge of designing for many audiences at once. Instead of vertical, opinionated tools, Notion’s horizontal primitives must feel intuitive for students taking notes and enterprises tracking projects—an abstraction problem with “hundreds” of use cases. His design quality rituals center on small trusted teams, daily visibility, fast shipping, and a remix culture that encourages low-ego riffing on what others build.

For founders hiring their first designer, Lovin recommends an “entrepreneurial designer” who helps answer the strategic questions—what problem to solve, how to interpret scattered feedback, and how to synthesize it into a focused product—rather than someone hired only to apply visual polish. In the AI era, prototypes can be produced quickly, so defensibility shifts toward story and brand connection.

His most concrete “build in public” advice: publish a change log weekly for two years. Customers followed the updates even before they needed the product, and the cadence created confidence that improvements were coming fast—turning ongoing development into a marketing engine and a narrative arc people could join.