Vida Stanic

We're a B2B company that produces content at a D2C pace - social assets, launch graphics, thumbnails, decks. Canva is how we ship that volume without a full-time designer. The brand kit keeps output consistent, templates mean nobody starts from a blank canvas, and the AI generation is now good enough for first drafts. It removed most of the friction between having an idea and actually posting it. Presentations yes - most of our non-investor decks are Canva. Video editing covers social clips and thumbnails; for our launch video and anything with real editing we still use a proper videographer and dedicated tools. The free plan covers basic social posts fine. We pay for the team plan mainly for the brand kit and premium elements - once you're producing daily, keeping everything on-brand is what you're really paying for. We mostly design in Canva and publish through our scheduling flow, but the built-in scheduler works fine for straightforward posts - it saves the export-download-upload loop, which adds up at daily volume.

Every screen of our product goes through Figma before it gets built. I've spent the past month on onboarding and marketplace UX redesigns, and all of it gets worked out in the file - comments instead of meetings, live sessions instead of handoffs. As a non-designer founder the part I value most is that I can actually participate: leave comments, check specs, move frames around. It keeps design a team activity rather than a black box. Our product files are fine. The one file that crawls is a marketing archive with hundreds of pages of imported assets - splitting it fixed things. Component-heavy working files have been smooth. For actual designers, not steep. For everyone else there's a middle period where you know enough to break auto-layout. Basics like commenting and inspecting take a day; comfort takes a couple of weeks of real use. Yes - variables and styles cover our tokens, and our AI coding tools read them straight from the file via the API and MCP server, so designs translate to code without a manual handoff step. That bridge has gotten noticeably better in the last year.

Our platform runs on Supabase - auth, Postgres, edge functions. We're a small team with no dedicated backend engineers and it covers that gap well. Migrations and branching make staging manageable, and the built-in advisors have caught security issues before they became problems. We've reworked large parts of the product twice and never had a reason to reconsider it. We prototyped on the free tier and it was enough to validate the product. Once real users arrived we moved to paid without drama - the jump is reasonable and predictable. Solid for us at early-stage scale - no outages that hit customers, and performance issues so far have been our own query problems, which the dashboard makes easy to find. Can't speak to huge scale yet. Not really. It's plain Postgres underneath, so the data layer is portable - a pg_dump would move cleanly. The stickier parts are auth and edge functions, but that's a migration project, not a hostage situation. It hasn't worried us in practice.

I use Claude Code to build our product - frontend and backend - but it also handles a lot of my non-coding work now: reading meeting notes, drafting emails, research. As a founder I'm context-switching all day, and having one tool that can pick up whatever I'm in the middle of has changed how much I get through. It started as a coding tool for us and became something closer to a general assistant. It catches real things on our codebase - edge cases in auth logic, missed error handling. I wouldn't hand it architecture decisions without reading the output, but as a first pass it flags issues we would have shipped. We use it heavily every day and the cost is easy to justify for what it replaces. Usage limits are the only thing we occasionally bump into on long sessions. The permission model is sensible - it asks before running commands or touching anything outside the project, and you can tighten or loosen that per project. We keep secrets in env files it doesn't read into context. No incidents in months of daily use.