Daniil Chebotarev

Led design on a 140M-download language learning app at Pearson.
I partner with pre-seed founders to design and ship their first product.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

Hi, I'm Daniil. I help startups go from idea to a product people use. Obsessed with 0 to 1: prototype fast, get real feedback, repeat.

I'll write about 0 to 1 design, building with AI, and the European startup scene. Say hi.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@ManishK32252652 Hey Manish, designer here, let's connect

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@arjun_prmkmr 🫂

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@masumparvej_ I thought this conversation died in 2025

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@markproduct Design, product, wannabe developer

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Get ready.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@charliee_ @ycombinator Oh that is amazing! Will test it out. It's always very annoying to describe the bugs in interactions and motion to the agent.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@samongaro_ It’s the best duo actually (especially if the vibe coder is a designer)

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@chalaska Having to convince 236 PMs and managers that the button does not need to be bigger

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@s_chiriac Pls enough with these 😅

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

I love George Orwell's writing principles. Reading his books is always so effortless. I'm always coming back to them:

1. Avoid stale figures of speech. Don't use a metaphor, simile or other figure you're used to seeing in print.

2. Prefer short words. If a short word works, don't use a long one.

3. Cut. If you can remove a word, remove it.

4. Prefer the active voice to the passive wherever you can.

5. Avoid jargon and foreign phrases. Use an everyday English word if one exists, not a foreign phrase, scientific word or jargon.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than write something outright barbarous.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

Before you chase product-market fit, check founder-market fit.

Are you the right person to build this? Do you know the problem from the inside, and will you still care about it in five years?

AI made building cheap, so ideas are everywhere now. What's scarce is someone who understands a market well enough to know which problem is worth solving.

I learned this the hard way. I spent 3 months building an invoicing tool for Swiss businesses. I'm not Swiss, and I had no network in that market. The product works. It has 3 users.

Building it was the easy part. I didn't know the people who had the problem, so I had no way to reach them. I ended up cold messaging 100 people on LinkedIn. 4 replied.

If you don't have the domain, find someone who does. A logistics manager who's been fighting the same spreadsheet for ten years, plus someone who can turn that pain into a product. That pairing beats a great builder guessing.

What market do you know better than almost anyone?

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

The multiplayer part is what I'm most curious about here. Right now agents are mostly single-player, one person prompting one agent. But in a product org the "next instruction" is never one person's. It's PM, design, eng, all with different context and sometimes opposite opinions.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

I get the point, richer channel = more personal. But we still text way more than we hug, so richer doesn't automatically mean people use it more. It's usually about speed, effort and context.

That's why I don't see cursor disappearing so fast. It's not the most expressive input, but it's precise, silent and works (almost) everywhere.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

Do you think speech would be the primary way you interact with the software?

I'm always a bit skeptical about these claims, same as with generative UI direction many designers were seeing as the future.

These new paradigms might work only in some context, definitely not for everybody.

Same as with design canvas, I don't think it's going away any time soon. The value of seeing how everything is connected is just way too important to let go.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@samongaro_ yeah the lesson was - don't spend 3 months building something nobody cares about.

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@nev_tsx Just one more bro, I swear it’s the last one… 😂

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@seojeek @samongaro_ Then you’re not building the right thing 😕

[Daniil Chebotarev @dancebotarev]

@miaferrariii Had a life 🥺