🎨 UX Pilot AI: From Side Project to 12K+ Paying Users in 2 years

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2 years ago, Adam Fard was running a $700K ARR design agency from Austria. Today, his AI design tool UX Pilot hit 12K+ paid users and 90K+ weekly active users.

While everyone's talking about vibe coding tools like Lovable (which I covered when they were doing ~$6M ARR), here's another breakout in the AI prosumer space but this one's different.

It's built by a designer, for designers (and others). And it's proving that in a developer-dominated world, the designer's perspective might be the ultimate competitive advantage. 

Let’s dive in.

💰Full disclosure: I’m an investor in UX Pilot and am helping Adam raise a small angel and scout round. If you’re interested, send me a brief intro about yourself and I’ll connect you with him.

Adam Fard spent 12+ years in product design. He built a successful agency that hit $700K ARR from Austria.

But in mid 2023, Adam began to notice the wave of progress happening in AI, and he couldn’t help but wonder how those breakthroughs might be applied to the world of design.

UX Pilot started as a side project within his agency. Adam wanted to explore how AI could help designers work better. 

The key insight that would later become UX Pilot's competitive advantage: Most AI tools were being built by developers who thought like developers.

Adam thought like a designer. And that made all the difference.

Late 2023, Adam developed his first AI tool by himself, with the help of GPT-4: a Figma plugin that generated UX workshops and frameworks.

Think of it as an AI consultant. You'd tell it "I want to create an MVP" or "I need to define our persona," and it would give you step-by-step activities to achieve your goal.

Adam distributed it through his existing channels: LinkedIn (40K+ followers), his agency newsletter, and the agency website.

The result was a bit anticlimactic. Two paid customers in the first week at $10-15 each. Not exactly unicorn material.

But then something interesting happened. People started asking for more than workshops. They wanted the actual designs!

One user specifically requested an AI wireframing tool. 

Adam looked around at existing options for wireframing and found them "rigid and boxy" and poorly executed. He decided to go all in on this signal and build an AI wireframing tool for designers.

Building a wireframing tool turned out to be much harder than expected. He kept grinding away with AI-assisted coding (aka vibe coding). As the complexity increased, he eventually brought on an engineer to speed things up.

By January 2024, Adam had built a basic wireframing tool. He ran the same playbook as the previous time - newsletter, LinkedIn post, and website update. 

This time, the energy was different.

Within a couple of weeks, he hit his first real milestone: $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. 🎯

It was a slow grind from February to July. Revenue grew slowly from $1K to around $6-7K MRR. Adam was doing everything: product development, marketing, customer support.

One key insight from that period was that users didn’t just want to generate designs—they wanted to bring them into Figma to iterate and polish the details. The team launched a two-way Figma sync, which quickly turned into a core value-add and a clear differentiator in the market.

July 2024 was the turning point.

Adam released an updated wireframing tool powered by Claude, switching from fine-tuned GPT-3.5. The results were dramatically better: more flexible, more consistent, more professional.

The numbers tell the story:

The model update was a key driver of growth, but the real breakthrough came from Adam’s insight: designers needed flexible, brand-consistent design generation. A system that understood information hierarchy, spacing, and screen-to-screen continuity. Something that felt human-designed, not churned out from a template.

As output quality improved, UX Pilot began to resonate beyond its designer core. Founders, product managers, and engineers adopted it as a fast way to visualize and refine ideas. One user said they saved over $3K and three weeks of work simply by prompting their concept in UX Pilot before committing resources to a build.

The AI prototyping space is heating up. Figma has AI features. Vibe coding tools like Lovable and Cursor let anyone build interfaces.

The designer-first positioning is UX Pilot's core differentiation. Most tools are built by developers from a developer perspective. UX Pilot approaches the problem differently. 

Instead of asking "how do we make coding easier," they ask "how do we make design iteration faster." Lovable and Cursor target developers building functional products. UX Pilot targets designers in the exploration phase, testing 20 variations before committing to development. 

To create the best design, UX pilot pursues a multi-model approach. They cherry-pick the best models for specific tasks and fine-tune their own for brand consistency. This lets them deliver flexible designs that follow requirements rather than forcing generic patterns. 

Figma poses a credible threat. They experimented with prompt-to-design two years ago but abandoned it, and have only recently re-entered the space with Figma Make, which competes directly with Lovable. One of Figma’s core limitations is that its vector-based foundation was built for static design, not rapid iteration on dynamic product ideas. It would be interesting to see how Figma positions itself as this market continues to heat up.

At the end of the day, momentum and speed are the real moats in this new AI era. The companies that win won’t just build clever features; they’ll be the ones that can move quickly, stay ahead of the curve, and stay laser-focused on delivering value to their core customers.

I’m excited to watch how this market unfolds!

Adam's vision goes way beyond generating pretty interfaces.

He wants to own the entire design workflow:

The goal: Replace the scattered toolkit that design teams currently use.

Today, design teams juggle Figma + Miro + Hotjar + multiple other tools. UX Pilot wants to be the one AI-powered platform that handles everything.

1/ Domain Expertise > Technical Background. Adam's design background wasn't a limitation. It was his competitive advantage. He understood something that his developers counterparts didn’t in the AI prototyping space.

2/ AI Enables New Types of Founders. The combination of domain expertise + AI-assisted technical skills is powerful. Adam built the early products himself with the help from ChatGPT and you can do it too.

3/ Positioning Beats Features. "Designer-first" vs "developer-first" positioning creates different solutions for different markets. Same underlying models, different lens, completely different value proposition.

4/ Listen to Signals, Not Just Metrics. Early usage numbers were tiny, but user requests pointed to the real opportunity. Adam found the AI wireframing opportunity by listening closely to early users.

5/ The Grind Precedes the Breakout. 12K+ paying users came after months of slow growth and solo grinding. Momentum compounds only if you survive the slog before the inflection point. You are just one model update away from making it :)

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See you next Tuesday,

Leo

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