In 2020, Framer was a prototyping tool beloved by a small, passionate community of designers. It was powerful and expressive — and it wasn’t growing the way we needed it to.
The hardest problem we faced wasn’t a UI problem. It was an identity problem. How do you take a product with a strong, opinionated personality — one people had built their workflows around — and change what it fundamentally is? How do you become something new without losing the people who believed in the old thing?
We sat with that tension for a long time. Talked to users constantly. Tried things that didn’t work. There was a version of Framer Sites that launched quietly and didn’t land. We learned from it and tried again.
What eventually worked was just staying close to what we believed: designers should be able to build real, publishable things. Not pictures of things. The website builder wasn’t a retreat from that. It was the most direct version of it.
The people who stuck with us, and the much larger group who found us on the other side, taught me something about this. People don’t follow a product. They follow a point of view. Hold onto yours clearly enough and the transition is something people can believe in rather than mourn.