Meet Framer’s co-founders Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk.
They worked together at their first company, Sofa. After winning multiple Apple Design Awards, Sofa was acquired by Facebook in 2011. After two years of helping launch major product features at Facebook, Bok and van Dijk realized that the design workflow lacked a tool that allowed designers to create and communicate an end-to-end product experience.
The pair moved back to Amsterdam and co-founded Framer in 2013, a high-fidelity prototyping tool used by companies all over the world.
To date, Framer has raised $9.3 million in Series A funding from Accel, and seed round investors Designer Fund, Foundation Capital and Greylock Partners.
I connected with Koen Bok to talk about design, awards and fulfilling startup life.
Tomas Laurinavicius: What’s your elevator pitch?
Koen Bok: Framer is on a mission to consolidate the designer toolkit by offering the first fully-integrated design, prototyping and developer handoff tool. My name is Koen Bok and I’m the co-founder of Framer, along with Jorn van Dijk.
Laurinavicius: What is the essential problem you’re solving?
Bok: We believe there should be a better way for digital designers to express ideas. Being able to quickly express complex creative ideas for experiences is a super power. We feel that between programming and direct manipulation, there is a lot more to explore and we want to open up this possibility to the largest number of people.
Laurinavicius: How did you get initial traction?
Bok: In a not too uncommon story, much of our initial traction came from dogfooding our own product and then getting our friends to use it. Thanks to our time in San Francisco, we knew a fair number of designers, most of whom were working on awesome projects at cool companies. We did some work around empowering our biggest advocates to teach Framer within their own companies.
These designers were essentially our early adopters, but because they were such great designers themselves and really truly got utility out of Framer, they very organically helped us spread the word about the product. This eventually grew into an incredible community of designers who just got it, and who were willing to put in the time to help others learn.
Laurinavicius: What is your unfair competitive advantage?
Bok: Because Framer is code-first and in the browser, it is essentially limitless in terms of possibilities. In that sense, we have always been the most advanced design tool on the market. Product teams at forward-thinking companies like Facebook, Twitter and EA have long understood the benefits of having a tool that supports, rather than hinders, innovation. So all we need to do to stay competitive is to build UI that lowers the learning curve to our tool and opens it up to every designer (and eventually every product person) in the world.
Outside of the product itself, our strongest advantage is our community, who today number in the tens of thousands all around the world. They’re putting in the time and effort to really support their fellow designers’ journey with Framer.
Laurinavicius: What were you doing before getting into the business?
Bok: In 2006, I founded Sofa, a software and design company in Amsterdam, where Jorn also worked as an art director. Over the years, we built a lot of great products, including Kaleidoscope, Checkout and Versions and eventually started getting noticed for them. We ended up winning some Apple Design Awards, which in turn led to a very surprising phone call from Mark Zuckerberg.
In 2011, Sofa was acquired by Facebook and our team moved from Amsterdam to Palo Alto. Over the next two years, Jorn and I went on to work on some great products at Facebook. It was during our time as product designers here that we witnessed a lot of the challenges that designers face when it comes to expressing their ideas. We eventually moved back to the Netherlands to try and tackle this problem, which is how Framer was born.
Laurinavicius: What is the most valuable lesson you learned?
Bok: Investing the proper time (read: years) into helping good people become the best pays off every single time. If it works, you can witness them doing the best work of their career, and it is a great opportunity to build deep, meaningful creative relations with people.
Laurinavicius: What is the best decision you have ever made?
Bok: To pick a problem I can work on for a long time. I really enjoy building things for creative people with taste. I’m confident I’ll find it as interesting ten years from now as I do today and that what drives me. Optimizing for work you enjoy over things like money provides a great sense of freedom, and a great competitive edge.
Laurinavicius: What is your biggest achievement so far?
Bok: Apart from the great apps being built with Framer like Facebook Live Video and Uber, we’ve taught thousands of people how to program in JavaScript. Learning how to program changes the way you think and has a profound impact on your ability to create. I’m very proud of that.
