# Company Context β€” "Weave" (working name) _Living strategy doc Β· Founder OS Β· last updated 2026-07-09_ _Status: Phases 1–5 **compressed** at the founder's request to jump to Phase 6. Confidence tags: 🟒 verified Β· 🟑 reasoned Β· πŸ”΄ assumed / needs validation._ > **Working name only.** "Weave" is a placeholder so the docs read cleanly β€” not a naming decision. Real naming/trademark is a separate exercise. πŸ”΄ --- ## One-liner A **design-system-native canvas** that turns your own tokens and components into **real, production-ready React**, held to a **craft standard (Impeccable)** so output is on-brand *and* genuinely well-designed β€” so what a designer composes is exactly what ships. ## Problem Product designers who already have a design system still can't ship on-brand UI without waiting on engineering. Today's AI design/code tools (v0, Lovable, Bolt, Figma Make) re-invent **generic** UI instead of using the team's own components and tokens β€” so the output is off-brand and thrown away, and the designβ†’code handoff stays lossy. - 🟒 92% of designers and 91% of developers say the handoff process needs improvement (Figma, *State of the Designer*). - 🟒 Figma Make users report it "won't use my library components" / "created new ones that just looked like mine"; v0 "treats the Figma file as a screenshot" (Figma forum; user teardowns). - 🟒 The market has already conceded the pain β€” Bolt, Lovable and Figma all bolted on "use your design system" features in 2025 because generic output was the #1 designer complaint. ## Beachhead ICP Product/UI designers and design-system / design-engineer leads at startups & scale-ups (~10–200 people) that **already have a design system** (tokens + component library) and ship a **React** web product. 🟑 - **User (feels pain):** product designer Β· design-system designer Β· design engineer. - **Champion:** Head of Design / Design Systems lead. 🟑 - **Economic buyer:** design leadership budget; escalates to VP/Eng at team tier. 🟑 - **Veto:** Engineering ("will the emitted code meet our repo standards?") and Security at enterprise. 🟒 ## Top Jobs-to-be-Done (from discovery research) 1. When I finish a design, I want the built UI to match it exactly without policing every pixel, so I can stop redlining. 2. When our design system changes, I want Figma and code components to stay in lockstep, so "the library" means one thing everywhere. 3. When I need a screen shipped, I want to produce it myself without an eng sprint slot, so I can move at the speed of the idea. 4. When I use AI to generate UI, I want it built from **my** components/tokens (not a generic theme), so I get on-brand output I don't throw away. ## Wedge / Positioning (April Dunford frame) - **For** product designers who have a design system but can't ship on-brand code without engineering, - **Weave is** a design-system-native canvas that emits real, production React from your own tokens + components, - **unlike** v0 / Lovable / Bolt / Figma Make, which are developer/prompt-first and generate generic, throwaway UI, - **so that** what you design is what gets built β€” on-brand, high-craft, with zero translation loss. - **Category:** "design-system-native design-to-code" β€” a wedge inside the crowded AI-builder space. 🟑 **Two things deepen the wedge (added after review):** - **Real-component mapping** β€” export emits the team's *real* coded components (their import paths + prop names), not Weave-internal clones. Without this the output never clears the engineer's merge bar and the wedge collapses to "v0 with theming." 🟒 (this was the single biggest gap the red-team found) - **Craft layer (Impeccable)** β€” beyond "constrained to your system," a Polish pass holds output to a craft ruleset (impeccable.style β€” an open-source anti-"AI-slop" design language for AI harnesses). On-brand **and** high-craft is a sharper position than either alone. 🟑 ## Why now AI codegen is finally good enough for *constrained* composition; design-token standardization (W3C DTCG) is maturing; "design engineering" is rising as a role; Figma Dev Mode's per-seat pricing backlash has opened a door. 🟑 ## Competitive frame (from existing knowledge β€” deep teardown deferred) | Cluster | Players | Why they don't own the wedge | |---|---|---| | Prompt/dev-first app builders | v0, Lovable, Bolt | Fast but generic output; prompt-first not canvas-first; not BYO-design-system-first | | Visual design-to-code | **Subframe** (closest), Builder.io Fusion, Anima, Locofy | Subframe is strong but leans "design in browser β†’ code"; others are dev-first imports or Figma-plugin exporters with fidelity issues | | Site builders | Framer, Webflow | Own proprietary runtime; you don't get *your* React components/code | | Incumbent | Figma (Dev Mode, Make) | Enormous stickiness, but generic AI output and a handoff "tax"; not designer-owned code from your system | **White space (the bet):** a **designer-first** canvas where a **bring-your-own design system is the source of truth** and AI is **constrained to it**. 🟑 *(Subframe is the nearest competitor; a real teardown is still owed to harden the "unowned" claim β€” see πŸ”΄ A4.)* ## North Star Metric **Weekly shipped screens** β€” screens whose code is exported and actually used, per active designer. No repo integration yet, so **proxy** it via an explicit "mark as shipped" + design-partner check-ins. 🟑 - **Activation:** first screen composed from the user's *own* tokens + components and exported. 🟑 - **Trust bar (primary, engineer-judged):** real PRs at design partners β€” merge rate + % LOC changed pre-merge. The right judge is the engineer, not the designer's self-report. 🟒 - **Wedge-usage guardrail:** % of exported screens composed *majority* from the user's mapped/real components (not stock base kit) β€” so we can't "pass" by validating a re-themed generic kit. 🟑 ## Business model (compressed β€” full Phase 5 deferred) Per-seat SaaS for designers with a usage component on AI compose; land bottom-up with individual designers, expand to design teams. Not yet modeled. πŸ”΄ --- ## Validation gate status (Phase 1) β€” **NOT formally cleared** The pain is real and well-sourced 🟒, but the core belief rests on unvalidated assumptions. Per Founder OS discipline, the MVP in the PRD is scoped as **the cheapest way to test the core bet**, not a green-lit build. Run the validation experiment (see PRD Β§Risks/Validation) in parallel with any build. ### Riskiest assumptions to validate - πŸ”΄ **A1 β€” Designers want to compose/own real code.** Many want the *outcome* (their design shipped faithfully, fast), not to own a codebase. Evidence is genuinely mixed; some designers report AI codegen is *slower* than just designing. - πŸ”΄ **A2 β€” Designers will adopt a new canvas.** Figma stickiness is structural (libraries, network effects, org process); real-world switching is usually *additive / per-phase*, not a replacement. - πŸ”΄ **A3 β€” The bottleneck is tooling, not governance.** Practitioners repeatedly say design-system drift/sync is a people-and-process problem a tool alone won't fix. - πŸ”΄ **A4 β€” "BYO design system β†’ real code" is genuinely unowned.** Competitive teardown was deferred this pass; Subframe is close. Harden before fundraising claims. ### Validation gate (sequenced, with kill criteria β€” run before/at the start of build) 1. **Concierge real-PRs (primary):** hand-build 5 partners' screens from their own systems and open **real PRs** against their repos. **Pass** β‰₯3/5 merged with <10% LOC changed; **kill/rethink** if <2/5 or reviews are structural. Tests A1 *and* the trust bar with the correct judge, with zero product code. 2. **Clickable-mock task test:** 5 designers complete the core task on a Figma prototype of the editor. **Pass** β‰₯4/5 unaided. Tests A2 (will they adopt a new canvas) before the canvas is built. 3. **Fake-door demo** vs. a v0-style generic control: **pass** waitlist conversion β‰₯2Γ— control. 4. **Competitor teardown** (Subframe et al. β€” owed from Phase 2) to harden A4. No code needed. 5. **10 problem interviews** with design-system leads probing A1 and A3. > Founder OS discipline: only the token-engine + shared-runtime spike should run concurrently with these. "Build in parallel with validation" is how the gate gets quietly bypassed β€” the red-team flagged exactly this.