How Ignoring Product Innovation Will Kill Your SaaS

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About InVisionApp

If you’re not familiar, InVision started out as a prototyping software.

It worked really well. Nothing came even close.

Before InVision, the only way to get a feel for how a web or app design was meant to work was either by having a really good imagination or by actually coding it even if just the UI.

But this was really expensive, especially when you had to iterate over the concepts.

If only there was a tool that would let you take design screens and connect them together while allowing you to navigate through them easily as if it was coded…

That’s exactly the problem InVision solved.

The value proposition was clearly understood by everyone and it was super easy to calculate the amount of money a team would save by using it.

The product worked extremely well and they even added animations to make the prototype even more app-like. In other words, they paved the way to the whole “design prototype“ concept that we all use nowadays.

And it was free to try out: a true product-led motion like everyone wanted with a bottom-up adoption that made it an easy sell with Enterprises.

The workflow went like this:

• Designers build the screens in SketchApp or Photoshop

• Export the JPGs or PNGs of each screen and upload them to an InVision project (this could be done in a few clicks with the plugin they offered)

• Mark up hotspots on each screen and pick what screen should be shown when clicking on it

• Add animated transitions as needed

• Present the prototype either through the web app or the mobile app

It was so quick for designers to iterate like this! No more waiting for developers to implement.

Not only that, it also reduced the amount of back-and-forth between developers and designers because now they could also experience the app instead of seeing a static version, so that also saved a bunch of time.

I think you can clearly see how it grew so quickly.

They basically nailed the save money, save time, and save effort items from the “value“ equaition all at once!

In 2017, 60% of designers were using InVision and reached a $1.9 billion valuation. They were clearly on the right path.

But something went terribly wrong.

Product focus (or lack thereof)

When they found themselves with so much cash (last round was $100 million), they began acquiring smaller companies and even established a fund to invest in design tools & plugins.

Meanwhile, they were haphazardly building features without taking into consideration the direction that the world of software was going in.

All of this resulted in a disjointed product experience without a clear strategy.

So instead of focusing on improving their product, they branched out their efforts and totally missed where design was going next.

There is, however, one product they really nailed: a whiteboard tool with an infinite canvas called Freehand. This was another great product that was much better than what competitors had. It felt like an actual infinite canvas.

How do you go from 2 killer products to nothing?

Marketing over innovation

I learned so much about design from InVision’s educational content.

They were everywhere and covered all steps of the customer journey. If there’s one thing they were the best at it was marketing.

InVision invested heavily in campaigns, podcasts, tons of design resources, blogs, you name it. But there’s one thing they totally forgot about: product innovation.

It pretty much became an afterthought. I’m wondering if they somehow believed they could delegate this to people on the outside through the investment fund they established, but it clearly didn’t work out.

Just because you have the best product now doesn’t mean it will remain like this forever.

There’s fierce competition out there full of startups that are trying to disrupt industries and the best marketing in the world won’t save you if you don’t give the necessary amount of priority to R&D for your product.

Feature release stagnation

Although this goes hand-in-hand with lack of product focus and lack of innovation, we’re actually talking about something simpler.

Users were requesting things to make their usage of the product even easier.

Instead of listening to them, what they actually showed was that they didn’t care about their customers.

It shouldn’t take years to release highly anticipated features like folder organization!

This is just so obvious that I can’t believe they actually missed this.

InVision had a super talented team full of A-players. How come nobody took a stand to protect customers from churning?

Repeat after me: keeping a customer is orders of magnitude cheaper than gaining a new one.

In most cases, all it takes is to make them feel heard. In software, this is by releasing features that they asked for. Obviously, I don’t mean blindly listen, but in the example with folder organization, it’s not debatable.

And there are tons of examples like these that absolutely make sense to have in your product especially when lots of customers are telling you about it.

Declining customer trust

Guess what? There’s a limit to how much people are willing take even for a product they find essential.

These things we talked about (delays, issues, unfulfilled promises) led to customers churning away and once you reach this point, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make people believe you again.

It’s much easier to avoid reaching this place than trying to fix it.

Innovation in the design space

At the end of 2016, a little-known product was released in the design world: Figma.

You might have heard of it.

This harmless tool overtook InVisionApp by 2020: a whopping 57% of designers were using it (close to InVision’s peak) compared to a measly 23% for InVision, which only continued to decline.

In 2023, Figma recorded $600 million in revenue and 50% year-over-year growth!

That’s all thanks to their effortless design-to-prototype workflow within a single, cross-platform, extremely collaborative tool that quickly won over designers who were using SketchApp, Photoshop, XD, and InvisionApp.

You no longer needed a separate UI design tool to then export into a prototyping tool. You had both in the same place.

And unlike InvisionApp, Figma kept on improving their prototyping capabilities at breakneck speed.

On the other front, we had Miro with their whiteboard tool. Also in 2023, they surpassed 50 million users, which is crazy. However, I actually preferred InVision’s Freehand over Miro because of the infinite canvas.

I’m wondering if that’s what Miro was after when purchasing it or was it just for the userbase?

Figma also released their whiteboard called FigJam, which I actually didn’t try, but it seems interesting and very Miro-like, so probably a pretty good alternative if you want to stick with the Figma ecosystem instead.

So with these 2 competitors chipping away at InvisionApp’s user base, there was no other option except to put the company up for sale.

What could they have done differently?

This seems really obvious to me and I refuse to believe that such a talented team as theirs didn’t realize it: build a UI design tool!

That’s literally the only thing missing from their design workflow. It’s what Figma has nowadays and it’s what they should have focused their investment fund on.

Had they worked on this, neither Figma, nor Miro would have been able to overtake InvisionApp.

It’s really that simple:

• They had the talent

• They had the money

• They had the insight in the design industry

I really don’t understand how they missed this.

But of course when taking into account that it took years to release simple features, then obviously building a UI design tool was simply not possible.

So they had to remain agile to make it happen.

It’s not like they were an old behemoth with tons of legacy systems that made it impossible to change and innovate.

If that’s what InvisionApp really turned into, then it’s a great example of how not to run a startup. Also make sure you pay off your technical debt on time unless you want new features to take exponentially longer to build with weird bugs showing up everywhere.

But most importantly, never stop innovating. A portion of your revenue should be dedicated to constant R&D.

Remember, the product is king. Not the marketing or sales.

That’s all for today. See you next week!

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