Launch day. This joy never gets old as a founder.
Thoughts Brewed: Edition 20
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Launch day. This joy never gets old as a founder.
What a day!
I have a running joke that you age in dog years when building a company, but there are days in the life of a founder that are just incredible. Days where the ups and downs of the startup roller coaster are briefly forgotten, and there’s just immense gratitude. Pinch yourself days. And today’s that day for me.
It’s launch day! And we just announced an all new Stark suite, with 3x the tooling covering 90% of the design-tool and desktop-browser market. With that we also announced Benedikt Lehnert joining as our Chief Design Officer, and our $6M in seed funding! 🚀
You can read about it all in Techcrunch.
In 2016, when Fook and I hacked together the first version of Stark–which we call version Negative 500–we had no idea how far we would take this. And today, we’re announcing the biggest changes, improvements, and additions since we first launched Stark. With that, I’m also incredibly thrilled to share that we raised $6 million in seed funding from some of the industry's best early stage investors, product makers, and operators.
This started as a side project. We were scratching our own itch as product makers to ensure we designed accessible products from the start. Since then, it's not only become a company but an industry-wide movement—supported by a vibrant community of people from all over the world. And we’re connected by one shared mission: To make the world’s software accessible to everyone.
It’s a mission that is so much bigger than any one person or company. And here at Stark we’re hell-bent on driving it forward. Because we fundamentally believe in a future where people with disabilities are core contributors to a society and an economy without limitations or barriers. Collectively, we in the software industry have a lot of work to do!
So, where do we go from here?
There are more than 1.5B people in the world with documented disabilities. Yes, the figure is in the billion(s). Yet, the majority of the internet is inaccessible in more than one way. And most studies don’t even account for mobile apps, software that runs in our cars, displays in stores and airplanes, or any other device that’s interacted with through software.
The reality is that, going forward, companies that don’t make their products accessible will be excluded from the market. They already miss out on the $8 trillion annual disposable income of individuals with disabilities globally. And the tightening regulations and stricter laws in the U.S. and Europe are just accelerating this trend. But companies will also see that it’s no longer tolerated to put the onus on disabled people to advocate a business case in order to be active participants in the world's latest innovation like anyone else.
Manual workflows of checking for compliance, using web overlays, single-line code snippets, and other shortcuts have only made things worse. Not only do most accessibility checking solutions for software teams start half way toward the end of the workflow, but they, in turn, create scenarios of expensive retrofitting. More importantly? They result in unintuitive at best and unusable at worst experiences for people with disabilities. Retrofitting existing software is incredibly costly and that cost, if not addressed, turns into debt which compounds. We’ve heard this from countless Stark customers already.
That starts and ends with giving teams the educational material and tools to do their best work and ensure this is accelerated.
What we need instead are integrated tools, better education, and streamlined semi- and fully automated workflows that meet software teams where they already work. Every software starts with design. Which is why we started here. With the introduction of the all-new Stark Suite today and the upcoming public launch of Stark for Mac (very, VERY, very soon) we’re taking a major leap toward this future.
It’s incredibly powerful when you realize you can update *all* instances of a particular issue in your design file or your whole design system with a click. Our Chrome extension has become really valuable for developers, product managers, and QA experts alike to check designs that have been coded. And if you haven’t yet, go try color suggestions in Chrome! It’s still amazing to see a rendered website update with better contrast right in the browser? My designer brain is blown.
Or! As one of our community members pointed out, use Stark in Google Chrome to simulate how a Figma prototype may look to someone with a specific color blindness. What?!
It is, and always has been, you who inspire us. What a privilege it’s been to learn and build alongside all of you.
I hold a number of titles I’m really proud of: Mom, Designer, Partner, Cookie Connoisseur, Bookworm, Founder, and CEO. For me as CEO though, the moments that are most rewarding are the ones where we learn that we helped a designer, developer, or product team as a whole to create a more accessible experience faster. Like when Arman shared how he used Stark to create Harlow, his outstanding and award-winning indie game for Nintendo Switch.
As we’re entering what is, without a doubt, a destabilizing period for societies and economies around the globe, it's important for us software makers to remember and recognize the power and responsibility we hold. And as we consider what’s essential, valuable and future-proof, let’s clean up some of the mess we’ve made, fix what we broke by moving too fast, and provide equitable access to the software-powered society, economy, and world.
That’s what gets us up in the morning! Doing it for the sake of a more equitable society and a better bottom line for businesses, where everyone becomes an active participant.
This post wouldn’t be complete without saying a massive thank you to:
To our team, the biggest of thank yous go to you, our community. You are what carries this vision forward every day in the work you do, because you know this is the way it simply should be.
To the Starklings who have gone on to new adventures, thank you for always accepting the challenges that came with building this product and the love you put in while you were here.
All of you, our users and customers, our community members.
Our incredible investors who believed in Stark from the first conversation in addition to all our partners and friends of Stark who challenge, push, and inspire us daily. Our $6M Seed round was led by Uncork Capital! 🚀 Incredibly valuable having investors that fundamentally understand the problem you're solving. Thank you Andy for being bullish about Stark and accessibility from day one.
That funding thank you extends to you Darling Ventures, Indicator Ventures, and some of the best operators, founders, and angels in the software industry, including: Connor Murphy, Mathilde Collin, Jason Warner, Laura Behrens Wu, Steve King, Des Traynor, Aubrey Blanche, Sriram Krishnan, Michael Mignano, Ayo Omojola, Eynat Guez, and more.
With now more than 40,000 users across platforms and teams at over 8,500 companies from the most cutting edge startups to many Fortune 500 corporations, it’s fantastic to see that product makers find inherent value in Stark. And while I love that our thesis starting with design at the beginning of the product development process resonates with people, it’s exhilarating to see developers, product managers and QA experts reach for Stark to help them do their work better as well.
With all that said, we’re just getting started! Thank you everyone for being on this wild journey with us. This isn’t a one, three, or five year mission — but y’all have believed in, advocated for, and stuck with us from the very beginning.
We want this to be quality, and we’re just getting started. Welcome to the Stark side.
Go sign up for a free account to give it a spin!
Food for thought
One thing I’ve been asking myself is: How long until we get things “right”? This question comes up personally and professionally. It takes half a dozen repetitions before you get anything remotely close to “right"; but you can only do that with feedback.
So the question becomes: How do you get people to stop being afraid to speak up or rattle cages?
As always, thanks for reading! And if you have any questions, go ahead and AMA by replying to this email or pinging me on Twitter. If I don’t have the answer, we’ll deep dive together.
I appreciate you. Until next time…