AI can take work off your team’s plate, but it can’t take responsibility with it. That distinction matters even more in regulated industries, where an AI-generated clinical note, fraud alert, or legal summary can influence decisions with real consequences. The goal isn’t to remove humans from the process, but to be intentional about where their judgment is required. On this blog, we look at how teams in healthcare, finance, and legal can build AI into their products while keeping accountability in the right places: → Where AI can safely support professional workflows → How to define clear boundaries for AI systems → Where human review and approval should happen → Why audit trails and secure data handling matter AI can automate a lot of the work around a decision. The decision itself still needs an owner. Read the full article: designli.co/blog/how-regulat…

Our CEO Keith Shields published a new piece on Founder’s Edge: distribution in 2026 is the moat you need to build before it’s too late. The core idea: building an MVP is becoming a weekend project. Getting the right people to find you, trust you, and buy from you isn’t. Keith breaks down why trust is becoming harder to copy than features, why founder-led sales still matters early on, and how founders can build distribution that compounds instead of starting from zero with every customer. Swipe through for the breakdown, and read the full piece here: linkedin.com/pulse/distribut…

AI can get you from idea to working product faster than ever. But “it works” and “it’s ready for real users” are two very different things. Once customers, payments, and scale enter the picture, the questions change. Can the architecture hold up? Is the product secure? Are you testing the right things? And how do you know what to build next? On September 23, our Partnerships Manager Carlos Sanabria is joining Founder Institute for a session on How to Go From Vibe-Coded to Production-Ready Products. We’ll break down: → Where vibe-coded products tend to fail across architecture, security, and testing → How to run a basic readiness check before putting your product in front of customers → Why context and guardrails matter when building with AI → How to move from shipping features to testing hypotheses → How to choose a North Star Metric that tells you if the product is actually working If you’ve used AI to get your product off the ground, this session is about making sure what you’ve built can handle what comes next. 📅 September 23, 2026 Register here: fi.co/event/how-to-go-from-v…

Join us for our next live workshop: Building a Fundable Product & How to Raise Capital Partnered with Fundex, we'll explore what founders should be thinking about on both sides of building a fundable company: creating a product that's ready for customers and growth, and understanding how to approach raising capital. During the session we'll cover: ☑️How to assess whether your product is ready for the market you're entering ☑️ The product and technical foundations that support a viable business ☑️ How to think about scalability before growth puts pressure on your product ☑️Where to prioritize investment across Product, UX/UI, Technical Foundations, and GTM ☑️ And with Fundex, what founders should know as they prepare to raise capital Whether you're building your first product, starting to gain traction, or thinking about your next stage of growth, you'll leave with practical questions and frameworks you can apply to your own business. 📆 Sep 22nd | 12:00 PM ET 👉 Register here: luma.com/iwps90pr

Founders make decisions based on signals every day. A user says they love the idea, growth starts picking up, or a customer pushes back on price. But how do you know which signals are actually telling you something? We put together The Signal Report to understand how founders are reading and responding to those signals across three areas: ✅ How they validate real demand before building ✅ What makes them rethink their GTM approach ✅ Which metrics they use to measure growth ✅ How they decide what their product is worth ✅ Where AI is changing the value equation It’s meant to uncover how founders are actually making these decisions in 2026, including the moments when the signals they trusted turned out to be wrong. The survey takes about 3 minutes, and we’ll turn the responses into a report with aggregated insights and patterns from founders across different stages. Take The Signal Report survey: designli.co/signal-report

Most SaaS founders are building some form of competitive advantage. The harder question is whether those advantages are actually working together. Technical architecture, proprietary data, customer retention, and distribution can all make a company harder to compete with. But investing in each one independently doesn't automatically create a moat. The strongest defensibility comes when those advantages start reinforcing each other. In this recent DesignRush feature on our 2026 Moat Report, we explore: ☑️ Why no single moat is enough on its own ☑️ Where SaaS founders are investing to become harder to copy ☑️ Why shipping faster doesn't necessarily make a product more defensible ☑️ How technical, data, distribution, and retention advantages can compound over time The goal isn't to protect everything. It's to identify the advantage your business can make stronger as it grows. Read the full article: news.designrush.com/designli…

“Designli was extremely proactive, responsive, and open to feedback.” Really appreciate this review from Anshuman Yadav, Founder & CEO of StratiqAI. He came to us looking for a clickable prototype and technical roadmap he could confidently use to validate his product with customers and build investor confidence. Giving founders that kind of clarity and something tangible they can actually move forward with is exactly what SolutionLab is built for. 🙌

Shipping faster can help you stay ahead. But speed alone won't give competitors a reason to stay behind. 71.4% of founders we surveyed are continuously releasing new products or features to widen their technical moat. At the same time, not a single founder rated their core technology as fully defensible if a well-funded competitor tried to copy it. That's the difference between moving fast and building an advantage that compounds. In his latest article for TechBehemoths, our CEO Keith Shields explores what SaaS founders are actually building to stay competitive in 2026, from technical and data moats to distribution and retention, and why trying to strengthen every advantage at once may not be the best strategy. The goal isn't to defend everything. It's to understand where you have an advantage and build deliberately around the moat you can make strongest. Read the full article: techbehemoths.com/blog/saas-…

A week in San Francisco is a good reminder of just how much founders can learn when the right people are in the same room. Last week, our team spent time with founders, builders, investors, and partners across the Bay Area, talking about founder-led GTM, building beyond the first version of a product, and what it takes to keep learning and adapting as a company grows. A big thank you to @StartupGrind, @founding, @stepconference, @foundersnetwork, and @FounderSocial for bringing these communities together and giving us the opportunity to be part of the conversations happening across the SF startup ecosystem. And a special shoutout to Carlos Sanabria and Mara Linares for representing Designli throughout the week! We came home with some great conversations, new connections, and plenty to keep thinking about. See you again soon, SF!

Our CEO Keith Shields just published a new piece on Founder's Edge: Your tech partner is the first moat decision you'll make. The core idea: code isn't the advantage anymore. AI has made shipping features fast and easy for everyone. What's actually defensible is judgment, the decisions a tech partner helps you make about data, service, retention, and distribution from day one. A few numbers from our MOAT Report that stood out: over half of founders have less than 12 months of proprietary data built up, one in five aren't running exit interviews to understand churn, and 86% are already being shaped by how AI tools like ChatGPT find and cite them, whether they've planned for it or not. Swipe through for the breakdown, and read the full piece here: linkedin.com/pulse/your-tech…

"Designli's Impact Week gave us a thorough technical audit of our SaaS platform with actionable recommendations. The team was professional and delivered on time. Definitely recommend!" This is exactly what Impact Week is built for: a clear, honest look under the hood of your product and a real plan for what to fix, all in one week. Thank you to our client for the kind words! 🙌

"For a well-trained AI handling a frequently asked question, resolution under 2 minutes is a reasonable target." That's our Director of Engineering, Felix Navas, weighing in on Clutch's new report on AI customer support. And he didn't stop there. Felix also broke down what actually determines whether AI support is fast or just feels fast: how well the human team has adopted the tools, whether the AI was properly trained on the product's own language and FAQ content, and model latency. Clutch surveyed over 400 consumers for this one, and the gap between what people expect from AI support and what they're actually getting is bigger than most companies think. Read the full report (link below), including Felix's take on where escalation to a human should happen before things go wrong. clutch.co/resources/how-ai-r…

"Is this thing a flaming liability under the hood?" That's the question a lot of vibe-coded founders are quietly sitting with. They've got something built, but they're not confident enough in it to actually market it or ask people to pay for it. Our CEO Keith Shields broke down what that actually looks like in practice on the Founder Social Club podcast, including the time we found an entire backend living in a single 200,000 line file. The fix isn't starting over. It's installing real engineering discipline into what you've already built, so the foundation can actually hold a business.

Designli is heading to the Bay Area as a Knowledge Partner for FounderX 2026. Here's why that matters: most founders fail in the messy middle, after the prototype exists but before it's something real users (or investors) would trust. That's exactly where Designli operates. And this year, we're bringing that experience directly to the FounderX stage. Carlos Sanabria, our Partnership Manager, will be leading a workshop on something founders rarely get taught: how to actually read your product data. Using PostHog and Claude together, he'll walk through turning raw usage numbers into real decisions about what to build next and where growth is actually coming from. Catch it at Founder Institute's Global Gathering, August 25-27 in the Bay Area. If you've been sitting on an idea, this is a good excuse to stop sitting.

Join us for our next live workshop: Founder-Led GTM: Building Systems That Learn Partnered with GSD, we'll explore how modern founders can combine timeless GTM fundamentals with AI-powered execution to build repeatable, scalable growth systems. During the session we'll cover: - A practical framework for diagnosing GTM bottlenecks - How to strengthen your ICP, Offer, Channels, and Conversion strategy - AI workflows that accelerate marketing, sales, and follow-up - When founder-led sales stops scaling, and how to prepare for your first sales hires with insights from the GSD team. - Whether you're validating your first customers or preparing to scale your revenue engine, you'll leave with practical frameworks you can immediately apply to your business. 📅 Aug 11th | 11:00 AM PST  👉 Register here: luma.com/qffjn2yt?utm_source…

In the age of AI, what actually makes a SaaS product hard to replace? We surveyed SaaS founders to uncover how they're building lasting competitive advantages in 2026. The result is The Moat Report: a look at the technical, data, and distribution moats that separate products built to last from those that are easy to copy. In collaboration with Clutch, Keith Shields shares the key findings and what they mean for founders building in an AI-first world. Read the article and explore the insights: clutch.co/resources/protect-…

As AI continues to reshape software development, founders have a different set of questions to answer. Keith Shields recently joined the Founder Social Club podcast to talk about what AI really changes for founders, why launch day is only the beginning, and why building features is no longer the biggest challenge. The conversation also covers: • Why traction should be the goal from day one • How AI is reshaping product development • When speed helps, and when it creates technical debt • Why experienced engineering still matters If you're navigating product development in the AI era, give it a listen. 🎧piped.video/watch?v=apTlScW7…

When we started analyzing the responses for our Moat Report, one thing became clear:  Most founders are thinking about growth. Far fewer are thinking about defensibility. They're shipping new features. Adopting AI. Launching products faster than ever before. But here's the challenge: if everyone has access to the same tools, speed alone stops being an advantage. One statistic stood out to us: not a single founder surveyed rated their technology as completely defensible. Not one. That level of self-awareness is healthy. The question is what happens next. Are you intentionally building something that gets stronger over time; through proprietary data, customer relationships, unique workflows, or distribution advantages? Or are you simply moving faster than everyone else? Because in 2026, the winners probably will be the founders who build something competitors can't easily replicate. Swipe through for a few insights that stood out from this year's Moat Report. 👉

Most founders still build first… then try to figure out traction later. But by that point, you’re already behind. What’s changed is simple: you can’t separate building from learning anymore. The teams winning right now are doing both at the same time: – talking to users while the product is still evolving – testing assumptions early (not after launch) – treating every feature like a bet, not a task list – and building traction alongside the product, not after it Keith breaks this down in the latest Founder’s Edge edition. If you’re building something right now, it’s worth a read. 📩 Read the latest Founder’s Edge edition linkedin.com/pulse/why-getti… 🔔 Subscribe for more insights linkedin.com/newsletters/fou…

"How fast can you build?" isn't the question anymore. The real question is: what are you building that can't be copied? AI has dramatically lowered the cost of building software. Features that once took months can now be replicated in weeks. That means your competitive advantage can no longer rely on features alone. So where are founders building defensibility today? We surveyed SaaS founders across industries to understand how they're thinking about moats in 2026, from technology and data to retention and distribution. The findings were eye-opening. Some founders are building compounding advantages. Others are moving fast without a clear moat strategy. And nearly everyone is navigating a market where the old playbooks no longer apply. 📊 Introducing The Moat Report: How SaaS Founders Are Building Defensibility in 2026 Explore the report to see what today's founders are doing to stay ahead. designli.co/founders-resourc…