Designing Products That Truly Stand Out
"When I look at things, I could see, 'This could be better.'" — Karri Saarinen
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." — Leonardo Da Vinci
What Makes a Brand? Lessons in Design and Trust
Most people think of a brand as just the logo or the color palette, however in Y Combinator's episode "How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out" Karri Saarinen reframes it far more extensively: a brand is every interaction a user has with your product and your company.
Early on as startups, we evidently place an emphasis on the design of our products, however at times we fail to acknowledge that brand is everything from your logo, to your UX, to how your sales team communicates with your customers.
Saarinen, a designer‑turned‑founder, brings this higher perspective shaped by deeply integrating design into product strategy. Today he is co‑founder and CEO of Linear, which provides a fast, minimalist project management and issue-tracking tool designed specifically for high-performing software development teams — simplifying the entire product development workflow, from planning to release, as an efficient alternative to more complex and legacy tools like Jira. It is used and even deemed crucial by Perplexity and OpenAI.
Previous to Linear, Saarinen was one of the first designers at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb, playing an imperative role in shaping experiences for two of the largest platforms today.
On another note, early in the episode Saarinen says that YC helped him understand that building companies does not have to be so complicated, "You just need the singular focus of making progress, building something for the customers." he then says that everything else will come either later or automatically.
How true is this? With all the countless variables at play, it is all too easy to get sidetracked in the process of creating a successful startup, however maintaining such a perspective will serve as a vital anchor.
In this post, using both Saarinen and Steve Jobs as examples, we will explore this notion further and see how one can achieve the ultimate brand by prioritizing three pillars: the power of simplicity, psychology-driven connection, and the transformation of quality from a goal into a habit.
"If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design." — Dr. Ralf Speth
Redefining Coinbase at a Critical Period
When Saarinen joined Coinbase, the company faced a challenge: its product worked, but its visual and emotional identity lacked clarity.
Cryptocurrency at the time was widely perceived as speculative, opaque, and high‑risk. Coinbase needed something more besides usability; it needed trust.
During the episode, it was even mentioned that at first, Coinbase seemed almost like "a hack project."
Seeing the problem, Saarinen introduced simplicity and restraint as core principles, reshaping interfaces to be cleaner, more intuitive, and easier to navigate for users without technical backgrounds.
In reducing this cognitive friction, he helped users feel confident making decisions that by nature, involved significant financial risk. Coinbase stopped feeling like a niche tool for insiders and instead began to feel reliable and accessible.
This simplicity implied visual noise with clean typography, deliberate spacing, and a restrained color palette, all design choices that stood in contrast to the abstract and speculative aesthetics typical of the crypto industry in 2014. At this point, instead of looking like just another volatile trading platform; it projected the stability and professionalism of an established financial institution.
This evolution in perception was decisive in making Coinbase what it is today.
Brand, Experience, and Human Psychology
"You cannot understand good design if you don't understand people." — Dieter Rams (German industrial designer)
Saarinen’s impact at Coinbase infused a product‑design mindset that aligned brand expression with user experience and human psychology. Every decision — from layout to language to visual tone, consequently, reinforced the consistent message that Coinbase is stable, understandable, and committed to protecting its users.
This clarifies the concept that brand is not just decoration like many beginners believe. it is a strategic asset at the forefront of product value. Effective branding shapes user perception and builds the essential trust required for comfortable engagement with your company.
Another example I often return to is Steve Jobs at Apple. Jobs understood something many early-stage founders overlook: products do not win solely on functionality, but on how they make people feel. He possessed a deep command of human psychology and used that to transform technology into desire.
Jobs also believed that marketing was about values, not only features. He famously looked at Nike as a model: Nike sells shoes, yet they rarely talk about the rubber soles or the stitching. Instead, they honor great athletes.
Further encapsulating the nuances of human tendencies, he enhanced the Apple brand by calling his inventions "the biggest thing since the printing press". Jobs thus anchored the brand in history. This made people feel that to not have an Apple product was to be left behind by the next great leap in their time.
Moving on from human behaviour and onto quality and simplicity, the other two pillars — Jobs being influenced by Zen Buddhism which has deep ties to minimalism, made a central focus on stripping products down to their essence, and obsessed over the most minute details.
For example, he famously insisted that the circuit boards inside the original Macintosh be laid out neatly and look beautiful, even though the casing was sealed and customers wouldn't see them. He compared it to a master carpenter finishing the back of a chest of drawers with the same high-quality wood as the front.
He also obsessed over the click of a button, the weight of a laptop lid, or the way a box slid open. He wanted the unboxing process to be almost like a "ritual" that signaled the quality of the brand before the device was even turned on.
Lastly, before the iPod, MP3 players were cluttered with buttons and complex menus. Jobs insisted to engineers that a user should be able to get to any song in just three clicks. The solution? The mechanical scroll wheel, which we know allowed users to navigate thousands of songs with a single thumb movement, replacing a dozen navigation buttons with one interface.
In the end, Jobs’ obsession with the 'essence' of a product reveals what is truly required to achieve greatness. It is a rigorous pursuit of the minimalist ideal — the Da Vinci belief that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
However, there is no magic in this minimalism; it's the fruit of exhaustive application.
Jobs discusses the process, "Designing a product is keeping five-thousand things in your brain, these concepts, fitting them all together, continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it's that process that is the magic."
This goes in hand with the foundation for our aforementioned anchor: the singular focus on making progress by building for the consumer. As Saarinen observed, this is the essential nucleus of developing a product.
Sounds simple, doesn't it? However, when one pays closer attention, especially to more late stage companies, this simple facet drops into a maelstrom of overcomplication (in part to sales and marketing running the show compared to the great minds creating the products).
While scaling a company undeniably involves managing many complex variables, prioritizing the customer experience will always offer a sense of clarity. By centering your mission on this one objective, you reclaim the narrative with preciseness.
Speed and Quality Can Coexist
In most early-stage companies, speed and quality are seen as opposing forces, as typically seen in Silicon Valley — however Karri Saarinen, dismantles this tradeoff through the way he’s created Linear.
The company maintains small, cross-functional teams that are responsible for the entire product lifecycle, from concept to completion. This eliminates "handoffs" between specialized departments (like product managers, designers, engineers), which typically slow down development and dilute quality. In all, designers and engineers share full responsibility for product outcomes. They collaborate directly and iterate fast, guided by set standards — following the philosophy that "Product must never be slow" and where quality is the default, not a checkpoint.
Speed and quality can coexist, but will you be ready to put in the effort required for it? As you study business history, you will find many examples of engineers successfully hitting extraordinarily tight deadlines set by co-founders. The quality won't always match the speed, but in some cases, you bet it has.
Moving from these extremes, quality must be the default. I like to repeat that how you do one thing is how you do everything, the more you notice this idea, the more factual and valuable you will see it is.
I hope this short read on the business side of the blog assisted you in developing a better perspective on branding and building for the consumer. Have an excellent finale to the year. Wishing 2026 to be everyones best year yet.
Happy early New Years! 🎆🎈🎉