Adam Fard, UX Pilot
Bootstrapped SaaS: From Agency to $5M ARR in 2 Years
Adam Fard is the founder of UX Pilot, an AI platform that helps product design teams create and ship great user experiences faster. In 2023, Adam was running a successful UX agency when ChatGPT and LLMs started taking off. He began experimenting with ways to apply AI to his team's design processes and built a Figma plugin that helped users work through UX frameworks and activities. Then during a user interview, someone asked a simple question: "I have all these ideas on my canvas, but can I turn them into something visual? Can I create a wireframe?" That question stuck with him. He started looking around to see if any tools could actually generate wireframes from text input. He found a few products claiming to do it. But when he tested them, he realized they were faking it. They were just swapping existing templates and personalizing the copy. None of them could truly generate a layout from scratch. There was a technical reason for that. Creating wireframes with AI was genuinely hard. So Adam started working on it himself. He explored fine-tuning LLMs, hired AI researchers, and tested component-based approaches. He spent four or five months iterating. Slowly, things started working. The outputs became stable enough to use. He added Figma integration so designers could bring wireframes into their existing workflow. Within six or seven months of that original user question, UX Pilot hit $10K MRR. But growth created a new problem. Adam hired too slowly. At $30K MRR, he kept questioning whether this was the ceiling. He added one engineer, waited, added another, waited again. Looking back, he says he should have hired five people at once instead of dragging out the process. Today, UX Pilot generates over $5 million in ARR with a team of 30 and over 15,000 paying subscribers. All bootstrapped. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why Adam initially said he didn't want the product to focus on AI generation, and what changed his mind a few months later - How he validated the wireframe generation opportunity by testing competitors and discovering they were all faking it - What happened when Google suddenly deranked all of UX Pilot's landing pages, and how he recovered - Why talking about product updates in his newsletter drove more engagement than traditional educational content - How focusing narrowly on design (instead of building another no-code tool) became their biggest competitive advantage
