Joel Spolsky said (I'm paraphrasing) that everybody only uses 20% of a given program's features, but the problem is that everyone is using a different 20%, so you can't ship an "unbloated" version and expect it to still work for most people.

So it looks like you've built something really cool, but I have to ask what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that other potential users need? Since this clearly seems to be something you're trying to create a business out of rather than just a personal hobby project. I'm curious how you went about customer research and market validation for the specific subset of features that you chose to develop?

I think the Apple II is one example of this.

It's also easier to run a feedback loop. If you implement Y, but Amy doesn't give you $5 a month, what are you going to do? Knock on her door? Users have no idea what they want half the time, anyway.

If you build a product and no one cares, it bruises the ego a bit more, sure, but if you self reflect, you can eek out your own bad assumptions, or bad implementation, or maybe a way to pivot that keeps your product ethos.

First let’s look at B2B, there the “user is not the buyer”. The buyer doesn’t care about “good taste” they care about a lot of other things.

(“Where is my SSO support for multiple users, I’m not going to have my IT department worry about tracking down usernames when Bob leaves)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794

Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever.

That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?

Games are closer to that than any other type of software even if they tend to cluster around popular genres and styles a bit much.

I don't know anyone that doesn't use a combination of at least one simple, one feature laden, text editor. Most of us via notes apps, etc., routinely move between a range of text complexity, suitable to a range of things we want to write.

Having the simplest to the most powerful apps be consistent between each other, wherever they have feature commonality, would be really nice.

Are your customers selecting one of five features in your product, or choosing any twenty from among a hundred?

Especially when, who the heck has time for trying out a dozen products? That's at least a full day of work, which probably costs more than the software itself.

No, you just read a few reviews to find the best full price option and best budget option and figure out if the budget does what you need or not. And often go for full price just because you don't even know what features you'll need in 6 months which you don't need now, so safer to just learn the option that is the most future-proof.

Anecdotally I haven't tried Codex and use Claude Code. The day I try Codex will be when I hear from my friends/communities that it's much better. Same for IDEs, STT tools, etc

Then again, I do this in my free time. At work, I rarely deviate from what is provided and the handful of things that I explicitly added.

Let's be real, unless some soul somehow had the same 20% as yours and left a review somewhere, you won't know if the features you need, or their implemention, fit your need until you try.

Which is where the bulk of the other 80% of features come from. It’s a cycle.

You start as you describe, you expand, you end up with this enterprise monstrosity, everyone using a different 20%. New tool comes along, you start as you describe…

Hopefully you can afford to say "No" a lot.

To me this is an argument for more apps that do less extremely well instead of a handful of apps that do everything poorly. There's nothing wrong with a tool that's honed for very specific user. They'll never hyperscale, but that's also fine.

Or then again maybe they can. Google Docs is plenty popular despite being closer to WordPad or TextEdit in terms of functionality than it is to MS Word.

Then Steve Jobs gives one of his most memorable statements about building good products while ignoring the taunt.[0]

I got your reference. Cyberdog!

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

for reference if anyone is interested in poor old cyberdog (and the meme reference): https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/10/teaching-apple-cyberdog-...

It's wild - I'm a big gamer but I strongly doubt I could even list 1500 games across all systems and time. And that many games make $50k+ each year.

[1] - https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/06/steam-stats-41k-gam...

I'm really just describing the long tail at this point. Gives me hope that maybe I can find that product before getting to retirement age.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

I am not even sure it was still true by the time her wrote it. It think that there is a set of core features (laying out stuff in a table, simple formulae) and some very commonly used features (e.g. graphs, data filtering) and a long tail of less commonly used advanced features (pivot tables, database like formulae like VLOOKUP).

Its more like 80% of users only use the same subset. Less commonly used stiff is important to the people who do use them, so you need it to sustain the network effects and enterprise sales.

What you’re saying is basically a majority of SaaS shouldn’t exist because it could just be an excel spreadsheet. Why would anyone pay for a subscription or something when they already pay for excel right? Problem is spreadsheets are a blank canvas and can be difficult for people to build. Just like a design software like adobes and figma. This product is trying to focus on one particular use case of design software and simplify it. It’s not a horrible idea and can exist in the market. I’m not sure it will succeed but conceptually it’s not destined to fail for the this reason. I think you need to also define what success means. For a single dev, could just be a thousand paying users. He’s not necessarily trying to be figma.

My most successful company was a tool that focused on 10% of a ERP feature. One that I had used and implemented at corporates but knew ERP vendors were selling hard for having 100s of features of which I only cared about 20%. Not everyone cared about those same 20% but I found enough people that did and liked my opinionated take on the software. It would have never worked if I had this mindset.

Vecti looks like a Figma clone if its landing page is anything to go by. You're not going to have an easy time convincing people to migrate from Figma to a clone.

In my experience, what people use is very malleable to how easy/good the flows are they are presented with. Given 100 equal options, they might use 20, and nobody picks the same 20, but given 25 options, 20 of which present a very good experience, almost 90% will go with those 20 without complaints.

I think this is a weird question. Sure he can't be the only soul in the world to need only those features. Those 20% people need gotta overlap. So I think a more generous way to read your question would be "what makes you think that the features that are personally important to you are the same features that the mass audience need?". If that's what you meant then I'd ask why appealing to the mass audience so important? Why maximize sales and risk making your product worse if the core of your product is to make things you care about?

This is a phrase that gets repeated and it sounds clever. But it's completely at odds with statistics, specifically the normal distribution.

We should say, people use 80-90% the same features, and then there's a tail of less common features that only some people use but are very important to them.

This is why plugin systems for apps are so important. You can build an app that supports the 80% with a tightly designed set of core features, and if someone needs to go outside of those they can use/build a plugin.

If you agree however that functionality profiles will repeat among users given a large enough user base then it implies a particular limited feature set can still be totally adequate to support program development.

And that is with assumptions stacked against you succeeding, if indeed, as would seem likely, that some user profiles are more widely distributed than others it would follow that a successful product can just focus on those.

Like lots of people prefer Trader Joes (limited selection) to a bigger super market

I remember reading something like this while talking about developing in C++.

I don't think that's really true, unless the behavior of each toggle is tightly coupled to the behavior each other toggle.

Case in point - most mature apps nowadays do have hundreds of toggles for various settings and features.

On the other hand, I'm afraid that if this did happen that FFMPEG frontend would look like a GNOME app and I would hate using it.

Want to generate a video, it's just a few lines of code. Want to connect the user's camera (with permission), it's just a few lines of code. Websockets? About 4 lines of code.

There could be 1000s of options for each of those but they mostly distilled it down to what most people need, and they're cross platform.

My favorite frontend is MPV, because I can generally forgo a GUI and just use single keystrokes to do everything.

This is a provocative joke, isn't it?

Could you elaborate a little bit more, how a sole developer should do these things in a meaningful way, if even larger companies and start-ups fail with this?

The most basic way is to do a 30 min interview with 20 designers that cover a few each of freelance, small company, med company, large company. Find out which features they use and don't, and what their pain points are, and whether a tool with less features is something that would be majorly helpful or not very important.

Then do a round of validation with AdWords, can you get designers to click on the ad for something advertised as simpler and bloat-free, go to a landing page that explains what it has and doesn't have, and then put it their email to find out when it launches.

To me, that is the absolute bare minimum to make sure you're developing something that can be a business, rather than just a hobby for yourself.

And these are not my ideas or anything. They're pretty standard stuff, and there's a lot more you can and should do as well.

The current system of a near-monoculture of garbage sucks.

Why would I want to use this over figma? The sidepanels and floating toolbar are ripped directly from figma (to the point I would fear a lawsuit). Figma is already a very clean UI, which tries it's best not to shove too many features in your face. Whiteboard, presentations, dev mode are all hidden behind menus. "no plugin support" seems like a very odd thing to flaunt as a feature. Many of the most popular use-cases of figma, such as interactive prototypes, svg creation, html/css exports are all impossible in this tool.

Then, there is the problem of this being maintained by a single person. Components are essential to any serious figma user, good svg and image handling is important (svg is buggy in my testing), selection colors is vital, color palette is important. When can users expect to see these features if the maintainer is busy hunting down bugs?

This is a technically impressive product, but I struggle to see the market plan. I personally hate distractions in software, I go to great lengths to debloat and disable features to make my computer interactions smoother, yet figma is possibly the last program I would want to clean up.

I started this project as a personal endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic, out of a personal desire to contribute to the field of UX design that I’ve always been passionate about, but at the same time I don’t intend on working as a solo developer for much longer.

Some of the features you’ve listed, are currently being worked on, which are going to be launched very soon.

> endeavour to scratch my own itch during the pandemic

Was this an "itch to build something", or an itch as in an annoyance you had with an existing tool? I'm skeptic of whether bloated UI is an itch many users have with figma or similar, which is why I'm critical of presenting this as the selling point for Vecti. If you manage to find an itch many people do have, and you provide the salve, you'll attract paying users.

Wishing you the best of success, really like seeing your vision and hope it bears out.

No, a company can’t sue you (well they can try, but it has no legal standing) because you rip off their side panel design. Thank god the industry doesn’t work like this.

[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69166901/figma-inc-v-mo...

The design of the UI wouldn't be covered by copyright anyway; Figma would have had to file and be granted a patent, which has a much higher bar (IMO not high enough, but that's a different discussion).

At the time of posting, there were no other comments with criticism, so I thought it better to contribute some of my thoughts.

My main concern for this project is not that it doesn't have feature parity with figma, but that I don't see a well-thought out business model. Vecti sells a seat-based subscription model (same as figma), has almost directly ripped much of figma's design (a proclaimed ex-figma employee pointed out that this may be cause for a lawsuit in another comment), and the only distinguishing selling point is that it has less features than figma (the tool it's trying to emulate).

My opinion (which may be wrong) is that figma is already very good at stripping away features, hiding them behind modes, toggles or contextual menus. I'm a figma power user, but I have held a course in figma and managed to get 20 non-technical people to grok the tool and be able to create their own interactive designs in half an hour.

I’ve been using Figma for a while, and true, it’s powerful. At the same time it becomes increasingly complex, difficult, bloated overall. Simple tasks now require navigating through multiple menus, and the learning curve for new users is steep (took me a while to understand it, and the same experience had it acquaintances of mine). Sometimes I just want to sketch out an idea or make a task without dealing with all that overhead.

The no plugin support thing actually makes sense to me. I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins. Having a tool that just works, consistently, without worrying about plugin compatibility or security issues? That’s valuable. And yeah, it’s a solo developer versus a massive company (that’s my understanding) but that is why it’s beautiful. Also it’s an uneven comparison if you ask me (but didn’t :)) ).

However, the fact that this is even being compared to Figma shows the quality of what’s been built. Not everyone needs enterprise features. Some of us just want a clean, fast canvas without the friction. Every new feature of Figma feels like an attempt to monopolize the entire market.

I think he did an incredible job. Good work. This has value.

[1]: http://penpot.app/

I'm curious which simple tasks you're referring to?

> I’ve had Figma slow down or crash because of poorly maintained plugins

Why not uninstall those plugins? Is no plugin support really the best solution to this problem? Was there not a reason that you originally installed those plugins?

This is sort of ridiculous. Apple tried to sue Microsoft for the look-and-feel of their GUI and lost. I think they might have tried to go after Samsung for copying the iPhone GUI? It certainly didn't work if they tried.

We all know Oracle tried to sue Google about API endpoints and lost. That's different from GUI elements, but a more concrete argument and it still failed.

You're just crapping on someone's hard work. If you don't want it, don't use it.

https://github.com/matry

Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?

Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!

Matry might pop up in another form. I’m considering turning it into an actual browser for designers. Right now designers are getting into the code and using Claude/Cursor to make changes directly. But they still have to know how to get the app running locally, which is a hurdle. So if they could just navigate to the site, make some design changes directly in the browser, Matry could then take the changes and create a PR on GitHub for them. Designer wouldn’t have to fuss with any dev tools. Kind of a cool idea.

Figma has pretty much reached the point that they’re inventing features, pushing AI and expanding to other products (figjam, slides), because they’ve reached feature maturity on UI design long time ago and they need to make more money by expanding the other roles (PO, dev) from viewers to paid seats that actually use the tool.

So, you have a good fixed target here for Europeans: keep copying UI features from Figma and get European businesses to start switching over.

Your pricing is way too high.

World’s best UI design tool with all the extra tools? 16€. Your limited offer? 12€!

How about: 16€ ANNUAL. ”For the price of one month of Figma, get Vecti for the whole year.” - there’s a promotion text for the website too.

P.s. My list of must haves before I could consider switching:

- auto layout (w/ slots if possible!!)

- components

- very simple prototyping with click & scroll support

Prototyping is required for user testing, so I’d have to buy software for that if I’d use yours.

Edit: I want to follow your progress. Could you have a mailing list where you update your feature implementation progress - let’s say once a month?

Thanks for your honest and thoughtful feedback.

Re: the features that you mentioned - these are definitely on my list. I thought that getting the product out there sooner was preferable to waiting longer at this stage. But I fully resonate with you, and I’m working on releasing them shortly.

Re: pricing, this is something I gave a lot of thought to, and I came to the conclusion that instead of participating in a race to the bottom, I prefer that the paying customers really see value in my product. I would like to offer a more generous free plan and find the right niche in the design field for those paying customers.

With this in mind, here’s a 50% discount code for any plan, for this community and anyone who would like to support this project: HN50

Re: the mailing list, it’s a great idea. I’ll implement a subscription list soon for the people who are interested. In the meantime, you can send me an email at contact@vecti.com with your email, and you will be the first person to get notified of the product progress.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

MVPs shouldn’t have 100% of features, they need to be small, get feedback and iterate.

This is the key to that quote. If you resolve to selling less, you can still have a multimillion dollar product. If you resolve to it being a billion dollar product, then yeah you need every thing for everyone.

It’s just like the RAD tools - or Java or any of the other cross platform frameworks - there is always something that you need to use that the vendor doesn’t support.

This space specifically is tough. Figma and adobe products are similarly cheap.

1. Where does this fit in Gartner’s Magic Square? No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce/ServiceNow/Workday/well known company

2. “What if I don’t need feature $y now. But I might need it in the future?”

3. “Everyone in my industry already knows how to use $x, so it will be easier to onboard new employees. Even if they don’t know it, there are courses available”

In today’s world for any SaaS to be taken seriously, it has to have Slack/Teams integration and SSO logins with the company’s IDP - there is an industry standard so if you support one, it’s relatively painless to support all of them. So what is your enterprise sales story - even for small startups?

Even if you work at a company that gives everyone a yearly stipend to get almost anything they want that will improve their work, you still have to get approval for any tool where the company’s info is sent to a third party.

These are all things that most people don’t think about when they want to turn their passion product into a business

I’m not making assessments of whether it is or not, but it sure as hell could be. There’s room for all this and he can choose to add features or choose to stay feature light.

I am a backend software engineer so I'm always on the lookout for a way to easily and simply create a professional looking landing page. Therefore I'm always asking the question... is there a template I can choose from and just start filling it in? Just yesterday I found a figma template hosted on figma.site and I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it. Typography, spacing, use of color, detailed data presentation (ie bullet points, 2 column layout, etc), and fill-in images are my starting point (as an amateur designer). I could spend hours tweaking a design but I would rather just copy some existing component designs and call it a day. Hope this helps.

The main difference lies in the rendering engine. Penpot relies on an SVG engine, which limits performance as project complexity grows.

Vecti is built on canvas and WebAssembly (the same architecture used by Figma). This gives us raw performance advantages, allowing you to handle complex, heavy design systems without the lag you might experience in SVG-based tools.

I'm interested in modding tools in this space in pursuit of finding weird new ways to create and work with UIs

Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?

Otherwise you spend days, weeks, months crafting your perfect design down to the pixel, and then someone else has to start again from scratch with a totally different approach. Maybe I’m missing something, but that feels incredibly inefficient and regressive.

> Surely it is an obvious next step to offer export to e.g. React, React Native, SwiftUI…?

These UI frameworks do not really operate in a "down to the pixel" way and so getting correspondance between a bitmap design and a representation in the UI framework is far from an "obvious next step" (if it were trivial to add such a feature, then of course the developers of these tools would add it).

Various concerns that aren't captured in the bitmap design - like how your screens transition from one to another, etc - can dramatically affect how the UI is implemented in a target framework. This is the job of UI engineers.

Well, used to be. Now it's vibe code all the way down.

However, I would’ve thought it would be feasible to create a design tool with this in mind, so the same fundamental design structure could be output either to the internal preview, or (any?) one of the target frameworks.

On the frontend: typescript, react, webgl with an emscripten/c++/wasm engine

On the backend: Python, postgres, redis

On top of that, their recent redesign comes with a number of boneheaded decisions that would make a Sketch alternative a gift from the heavens above...

Take my upvote

1. Every action seems slower than Figma and Sketch-my main tool

2. Some short cuts didn't seem to to work, like how I can't copy and paste a canvas. It was hard for me to forego muscle memory

3. Is there a way to try it without signing up for an account? Like a sandbox? I tried to delete my account but because I logged in via Google and it requires me to enter a password (I don't know), I can't delete.

Have you considered adding an MCP server? I've had good results recently using the Figma one just

It's such a simple feature but it massively improves the workflow of working with vectors. Never understood why Figma, Sketch, or Affinity Designer never implemented it.

Not what you’re after, but working with groups in Figma can be handy.

Try cmd+click to select elements inside groups directly. Then shift+enter to select the parent group. You can do enter again to select all elements in the group. You can cycle selection in the group with tab. All of this works with multi-select, which can be very efficient.

IMO working with groups in Figma is much more powerful than illustrator Depends what you are trying to do, of course.

Objects in front of the group are not removed/hidden and you can still select objects outside the group. Even worse, accidentally selecting an object outside the group exits the group.

Illustrator has a tool to select objects inside a group too although never use it.

Not sure why I would pick this over a self-hostable battle-tested option.

Not that I like to see that stuff but you did animate the text and feedback does help usability.

Btw, your LinkedIn and Email icons on the footer are not linked.

Congrats on completing this project and good luck.

I'd be worried about a lawsuit here, primarily due to the overall app architecture and property panel on the right. While there are differences between your implementation and Figma's, it's close enough that things are very clearly Figma-inspired. There've been a lot of Figma copycats, and Figma does have a track record of successful lawsuits against them.

Great work with the backend architecture (a lack of a proper wasm renderer is why penpot will never be competitive), but you're in dangerous territory with the UI.

Just for comparison, here's a side by side of each: https://image.non.io/940a433a-3c25-4610-88e8-4eec810f2235.we...

“While there are differences between Figma’s implementation and Sketch, it's close enough that things are very clearly Sketch-inspired.”

Figma doesn’t have patent on side panels. I don’t think worrying about lawsuits is applicable here.

I’m sure Figma will attempt to abuse its power to kill competition regardless. It’s no different than other corporations.

Likely EU has better regulations.

The Penpot WASM renderer is entering open beta any time now.

I wouldn't, because such a lawsuit would trivially get dismissed. There are no intellectual claims to be had on app architecture or the design of a property panel, otherwise the whole industry would be a bloodbath.