Dec 31, 2024
From Idea to Reality: Our story
Product teams shouldn't have to choose between speed and design quality. This is the story of how Readdy uses AI to bridge the gap between product ideas and professional interfaces.
Frank Zhu
Frank is the founder of Readdy.ai. A developer-turned-founder with 10+ years of product experience, Frank loves great design, and he's building the tools he wishes he had when launching his first startup.
The Design Challenge for Modern Teams
I've been building digital products for over a decade, and something has always bothered me: it still takes far too long to turn product ideas into reality. The workflows are still winding - teams bounce between tools, spec documents, and development, often losing fidelity (and sanity) along the way.
Our company created tools for designers. While our tools are primarily for professional designers, we keep seeing founders and developers trying to use our tools too. Everyone wants to better visualize and present their product ideas. However, the learning curve of the design tools often proved daunting, as most non-designers got stuck navigating complex interfaces and workflows. When we tried simplifying things, designers lost the fine control they needed.
This mismatch nagged at us. Often, early stage product teams don't have an in-house designer - it's not that teams don't care about design. On the contrary, most desperately want their products to have strong user experience, and look profesional. But teams also face an impossible choice: compromise on design to ship faster, or slow down to get it right. In 2024, this shouldn't be the tradeoff we're stuck with.
A New Chapter in Design Tools
The past two years have been a revelation in tech. We've watched AI transform how we write, how we paint, how we code. As we first saw the strides in LLM in 2022, we started wondering: how can we use this technology for product design?
Our early experiments with AI-powered design were... interesting, to put it kindly. The outputs felt random, disconnected from real-world design principles, and many just didn't look great.
Our early attempts vs. now. We're just getting started!
But things shifted as the new large language models were able to take in more context, and generate higher quality outputs. Suddenly, we could generate layouts that weren't just visually appealing, but actually made sense for real products.
We tested the feature in November within our design tool. While we received very positive feedback from our users, users also told us that the interface of the professional UI design tool was too complicated to navigate for non-designers. It was clear to us that nesting the feature inside the tool means that many, often people who need this feature the most, will be locked out.
That's why we're introducing Readdy. With a simplified interface and streamlined flow, we hope that Readdy will be enjoyed by all. Moreoever, we're excited by the potential to rethink the entire product development workflow - where it's seamless to go from idea to design to code. Imagine if translating your idea into a polished interface, backed by code, was as natural as describing it to a colleague. That's the future that finally feels within reach.
Building for Teams Like Ours and Yours
As a founder, I've spent countless late nights commenting on designs files - it's difficult to get product ideas across clearly. As an engineer, I've spent even more hours trying to match design specs with code, while racing toward deadlines. These frictions between product ideas, design, and coding, aren't just abstract problems. They're the frustrations that kept showing up in every project, every team I've worked with.
What became clear is that most teams don't care what tool stacks are used. They need a faster path from idea to implementation. When you're moving quickly to validate a product or launch a new feature, you shouldn't have to choose between good design and good pace.
The best solutions often come from building what you needed yourself. That's what drives me: creating the tool I wish I had when I was (or rather still am) that stressed founder trying to ship an MVP, or that developer trying to match a Figma design pixel-perfectly at 2 AM.
Why We're Just Getting Started
The more we're witnessing the power of AI, the more convinced I am that we're at the beginning of a fundamental shift in how teams build products. The old way, where design was this separate phase awkwardly duct taped to ideation and development, just doesn't make sense anymore. We're seeing AI break down barriers across tech. The same transformation that is happening with coding is also coming to design - empowering everyone to create professional products without years of design training.
I believe the future belongs to tools that work the way teams actually want to work. Tools that understand context, suggest solutions. Most importantly, tools that close the gap between ideas and implementation, so teams can focus on what matters - building products people love.
I'm sharing this because I believe we're all part of redefining how products get built. The tools we use shape what we create, and it's time for those tools to catch up to how modern teams actually work. The best part? We're just scratching the surface. Every month brings new capabilities, new possibilities for making the product development process more intuitive.
Please join us on this journey. We can't wait to explore with you where it leads us.
