AI Hustle: Make Money from AI

Monetizing Design with Claude's Disruption

17 min
Apr 24, 20264 days ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

The episode explores Claude Design, Anthropic's new AI-powered design tool that generates websites and prototypes with advanced animations and interactivity. The hosts discuss how Claude Design is disrupting traditional design software like Figma and Adobe, including the dramatic departure of Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger from Figma's board just before Claude Design's launch.

Insights
  • AI model companies are expanding beyond improving models to capture entire software stacks, directly competing with and disrupting established design tools rather than partnering with them
  • Claude Design democratizes advanced web design capabilities (animations, interactive elements, cursor-following effects) that previously required expensive designers or extensive technical knowledge
  • The competitive landscape is shifting: large AI companies with access to superior models can quickly clone and outpace specialized software companies, raising questions about startup viability
  • User experience and simplicity are becoming key differentiators; tools like Canva and Claude Design succeed by reducing complexity compared to feature-bloated software like Adobe and Figma
  • The ability to import Figma files directly into Claude Design and export production-ready code represents a direct threat to Figma's market position and pricing model
Trends
AI companies vertically integrating across software stacks rather than focusing solely on model improvementDesign tool consolidation: AI-powered design platforms combining prototyping, code generation, and SEO optimization in single ecosystemsShift from specialized design tools to conversational AI interfaces for design workflowsAccessibility of high-end design capabilities to non-designers and small businesses through AI automationStock market reaction to AI disruption: Figma stock down 7%, Adobe down 1.5% following Claude Design launchExecutive talent migration from traditional software companies to AI labs (Instagram co-founder to Anthropic)Insider trading concerns: board members resigning from companies immediately before competitive product launchesSaaS pricing model vulnerability: subscription-based tools facing disruption from integrated AI platformsCode generation from design files becoming standard feature rather than differentiatorUser frustration with legacy software driving adoption of simpler, AI-powered alternatives
Companies
Anthropic
Launched Claude Design, an AI tool disrupting Figma and Adobe; employs Mike Krieger as CPO
Figma
Design tool facing major disruption from Claude Design; stock dropped 7% after launch; Mike Krieger left board before...
Adobe
Design software company criticized for poor UX, complex interface, and predatory cancellation fees; stock dropped 1.5...
Lovable
AI web design tool that Claude Design improves upon; hosts have existing projects built with it
Shopify
E-commerce platform sponsor offering 1 euro trial for store building and content creation
OpenAI
Competitor to Anthropic in AI model development and software integration strategy
Google
Has cloned AI Box product; represents large tech company threat to specialized AI startups
Meta
Acquired Instagram; Mike Krieger worked there before joining Anthropic
Canva
Simplified design tool praised for intuitive UX; hosts prefer it over Adobe for design work
AI Box
Host's AI startup company; competes with Google's cloned version but maintains advantage through multiple models
People
Mike Krieger
Instagram co-founder who left Figma board immediately before Claude Design launch; led Claude Design development
Jayden
Co-host demonstrating Claude Design features; experienced designer critical of Figma and Adobe; built projects with L...
Jamie
Co-host and professional designer; discusses design industry implications and workflow improvements from Claude Design
Quotes
"Claude just kind of picks one industry after another and kind of decimates them with their amazing products"
Jamie~10:00
"Figma was the bane of my existence for like a year of my life. So in the nicest way possible."
Jayden~25:00
"There used to be, if you had a good business idea, you'd get acquired by a bigger company. Now people like Anthropic and OpenAI will just copy you and put you out of business"
Jamie~30:00
"Cloud Design is not that revolutionary, if I'm being honest. Like anyone could build it with a team and a little bit of time. Like it's not an insane product."
Jayden~32:00
"Adobe, the way that you guys make it so that if someone does an annual subscription, in order to cancel their annual subscription, they have to pay like $100 cancellation fee. That is the shadiest thing I've ever seen."
Jayden~38:00
Full Transcript
Starting a business means wearing many hats, designer, marketer, manager, while chasing your vision. Shopify powers millions of businesses with tools to build beautiful stores, create content, and market with ease. From inventory to shipping, everything runs smoothly. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Sign up for your 1 euro trial today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. Your favorite TV programs watch when you want to? With NLZ, you watch live, back and sometimes even forward after $7.95 per month. NLZ, watch good. You can explain a website or a product that you'd like it to design. It will pull it up and create it for you. And you have kind of a visual editor. So if you're watching this on YouTube, by the way, and there's a link in the description, we'll be screen sharing a little bit of what it looks like and talking a little bit more about this story. But I think there's also a huge story in here about Figma, which is, you know, how you used to design things, which is taking a pretty massive beating lately after a lot of this stuff comes out. So anyways, we're getting into all of it on the podcast today. There'll be plenty of drama. Before we get into that, though, Jamie, do you want to tell them about the school community? Yeah, if you've ever been interested in learning how to make money using AI or even grow your business, you got to check out our school community called AI Hustle. Each week, we release bonus content over there and we cover a variety of topics. We've been heavy in vibe coding this year because Jaden and I are both building projects with it, but we have over 100 episodes over there, plus a thriving community of people who are in the same space building things. It's really a great place to be. It's $19 a month, and you can lock that price in today if you join. And we also this week released more of a tutorial about Cloud Design, how Jayden is actually using it to build a really cool news site that will pull in his own quotes from podcasts. It's really, really cool. So if you want to go check that out, check out our school community. We'd love to have you be a member. But let's talk about Cloud Design. This is especially exciting news to me as well because I'm a heavy Lovable user. And Lovable definitely has some of its downfalls, specifically in the design area. You know, there's a lot of times Lovable sites, unless you make a lot of tweaks, look very similar to one another. They kind of have a basic design that requires a lot of time and tweaking to get it to look really, you know, highly designed, unique, that sort of thing. But with Claude Design, it's really impressive. You can essentially screenshot other websites that you like how it's designed and it will copy for you. You can make visual tweaks and it happens instantaneously. You don't have to prompt Lovable to make the change and then wait 30 seconds. You know, it's very fast. Looks really, really good. And so, yeah, I think Claude just kind of picks one industry after another and kind of decimates them with their amazing products. As Jayden had said, Figma, you know, maybe in trouble after this because it basically does everything that Figma and then also Level does. But it's within Anthropics, you know, ecosystem. You can put it under your same tier that you're paying for and just make your workflow a lot faster. So, but Jayden, what have you experienced with Cloud Design? Yeah, what are your thoughts on it? Okay, well, I want to just give everyone watching like a sneak preview of it. Um, but for everyone listening, the thing that I think is amazing about this. So if you go over to Claude design, it's just Claude dot AI slash design. For some reason it took me forever to find that URL. Like I just kept getting like landing pages about, you know, news releases on it. So anyways, that's how you find it. Um, but you have a bunch of different places. You can either make wireframes or high fidelity prototypes. I've used it to create full website designs that look incredible. They have an example section on there, which is kind of cool and gives you some ideas of things you can do. So in their example section, they have like, it just does like all these very creative things. So it can make animations. For example, they have something that says the dragon breathed fire into the cold night and smoke curled around his metal scales and bitter wind carried the sparks across the snow Where an electric storm lit up a forgotten okay whatever Every single time it has one of those descriptive words like fire the word fire is orange There literally like it looks like spark fire particles are coming off of it. The word smoke has literal like smoke animation coming off of it. The word wind has like a wind animation. Snow has snow. If you hover over the word electric, it looks like it's like zapping the word. Guys, it can just do the most incredible, creative, interesting things built into your website. So your website is very dynamic. It has like organic looking shapes that can move and meld like any sort of animation you would want designed or thing you want created. Like it can build it and build it integrated into your website, which is really cool. It can help with app designs and actually wireframing an entire app. And in addition to that, something else I thought was cool is just it builds like in it builds basically like little apps, mini apps inside of your website that you can use. So anyways, there's a whole bunch of really cool examples you can go over and look at on their examples tab to make your website look really cool. I've seen people using it to make video, which is really crazy. And, you know, all sorts of like apps and different cool things. Another thing that I see a lot of people using it for, it's like very interactive. So you have like smoke, but it follows your cursor wherever on the screen. Anyways, it does all sorts of really cool features that are just like the logic is all built into your website. And you've probably seen websites with some of these cool features before and wondered how to do it. It's all on Claude Design can help you do a lot of this stuff. They also have, so that's for like a prototyping tab. They also have specifically slide decks that they can help you create. You can create things from a template. I mean, it's not just a Claude Design tutorial video. We have a whole one on the school community where I show a whole website I built and how. But one thing that I did think was pretty cool and also pretty scary is, I mean, it's not scary for users. It's great for us. But for the design industry, shots are definitely being fired because right now Claude Design has a lot of drama with Figma. So and just like one last thing on the actual platform itself while I show it off. There's an interesting thing inside of Claude Design. So when you're going to go and create a new file, it's kind of like chat GPT or whatever or cloud where you chat on the side, and it's going to create your thing for you. They actually have a drag in a Figma file button. So literally, to x like if you are, you know, a heavy Figma user, and all your projects are on Figma, you can download your Figma file, upload it here. And it's going to not just not just create the design, but like it codes the whole website for you. And you can export this to cloud code. And it's like ready to go. So they really have a literally have a Figma file button. they're taking a shot directly at Figma. You also have like design systems. So you can add all your own brand colors and fonts and logos and information. And it will use all that to design things specifically for your website, which is cool. Or you can add screenshots of whatever you want the design to look like. So there's all sorts of really cool things. You can sketch stuff out and then tell it to like, you know, you want your thing to look specifically a certain way, you sketch it out and it will turn it into a website or code. So it's a very, very powerful tool. Now, what does this mean for the industry? A bunch of different things. I mean, first of all, Jamie, just doing this like tutorial and talking about some of the features, what are your thoughts as someone who is like, I'm going to be honest, you are kind of a legendary designer. You make websites for companies for a living. Give me your take. Yeah, so I mean, I think it's really cool. I think moving forward, some of those animation things where it follows your cursor, those are kind of at this point, up to this point, I should say, have separated, you know, a standard website from like a $10,000 high design website. Now it's basically opening the door for it to be super accessible to anybody. So I think it's going to make, if you are in the design space or you're making websites for people, it's going to allow you to level up your site quality dramatically. And either you're going to be able to stay competitive or raise your prices because of this new tool. And I think, again, from a workflow standpoint, it just makes things so much easier. I don't think you've mentioned this yet, but after you get all your design stuff, you can then import the design over into Cloud Code and then have it do all the SEO backend stuff for you if you're making a website, I should say. And it just makes things so you can have not only a really beautiful website, but one that also ranks well and does everything you need to as far as that goes. So I super excited about this I definitely am going to have to Well it unfortunate because I already have quite a few sites built with Lovable and I tweaked them a lot And so I'm like, I don't really feel like I can stop paying for it, although it may not take too long to import them over here. I have to sync them all to GitHub and all that kind of stuff, which takes credits in Lovable. But I think long term, I might need to make the switch. So speaking of the drama now, we got to get into all of the drama. There was one of the board members for Figma. His name is Mike Krieger. You guys might recognize this guy because he's actually one of the co-founders of Instagram that was purchased by Zuckerberg. He ran it under meta for a little while and kind of left. I think him and Zuck butted heads a bit on Instagram. But regardless, he left with his other co-founder and they went and started like a news app called Artifact, I think. I mean, I don't want to say like it flopped, but basically it didn't get a lot of users and they shut it down. So whatever you want to call that. I think it was very beautiful. He's big on design, right? Once they shut it down, he went directly to go be to go work at Anthropic. He was their CPO, their chief product officer, I believe. And so he's been working there for like for like, I think, over a year now. I remember reporting on this a while back that Mike Krieger left. he apparently was in charge of a lot of this Claude design or worked over it but he also was on the board for Figma and so right the the crazy drama is that right before Anthropic dropped this Claude um design feature he formally excused himself and removed himself from the board of Figma so he's like on the Figma board while they're cloning them and destroying them internally but before they do the big product release he's like all right guys I'm uh excusing myself I'm off the board, leaves the board, drops this. And, you know, a lot of people are saying this is cratering Figma stock, although I don't think Figma is a publicly traded company, if I'm not mistaken. But maybe they're like internal stock, or maybe they are, I should, I should verify that. But either way, there is a lot of news or like a lot of people talking about Figma tanking or Cloud Design tanking Adobe and Figma's stock when they released this. So the stock of Adobe apparently saw 1.5% drop on this launch and Figma had a 7% stock design or oh yeah so Figma must be public company okay so Figma's stock yeah went down on the news of all of this so yeah there is definitely some some bad blood especially with what I showed you guys earlier of like how you can literally import a Figma project in there I would like to just formally say I am not sad about this. Figma was the bane of my existence for like a year of my life. So in the nicest way possible. And to be fair, if Figma wants to basically clone cloud code and have a chat interface where you talk to it and it builds things for you, I'll eat all my words and I'll become Figma's biggest fan. But basically, and actually Adobe too. I have this major beef with Adobe as well, which I've used my whole life. I just absolutely detest software that has a thousand different little settings and buttons. And anytime I want to do something, I got to go watch a YouTube tutorial. That is just so not intuitive. It's a horrible user experience. I think all of these companies got away with it for so long, just building horrible design tools. And I basically switched from Photoshop, which I used for my whole life growing up to Canva in college, which Canva was like this really nerfed thing, but it was so simple, so clean, so easy. I use Canva for all my designs. I'm sure I sound very ghetto to everyone. Any real designers listening to me. But I will also say, to be fair, my first app I ever built was with Adobe XD, which was kind of like a ghetto version of Figma. I didn't really know about Figma at the time I started in college and I'd used Adobe. So I figured out the whole Adobe XD thing. Then once I started building AI Box three years ago, I was like, OK, this is a serious company. We can't use XD anymore because all the designers use Figma. And so I'm like, OK, I got to figure out Figma. It was way worse. It was horrible. Terrible year. I just hired designers and I paid an insane amount of money to get everything designed. And now that they're getting disrupted, I'm just like sort of happy. I'm sorry. Well, that's honest at least. So thank you for your, for your, your honest opinion. I would love to have a conversation. Maybe you'll say this for another podcast episode, but there's, I feel like a big change coming with a lot of these things. There used to be, if you had a good business idea, you'd get acquired by a bigger company. Now people like Anthropic and ChadGBT or OpenAI I should say will just copy you and put you out of business So I feel like the landscape as far as tech and building companies is changing And it's a little bit, I don't know, scary to see a company that's been really big, really popular for a long time basically just get ripped off. You make a great point. and yeah, so like my whole thing about like, ha ha, Figma getting disrupted. Okay, well, if it was my startup, I won't be so happy, which by the way, Google has already cloned AI Box. We just have way more models, not just the Google models. So we'll always be the king. But yeah, so it never feels good when the big guys rip off on the little companies and especially because I think you have a great point. It brings up a really interesting question that I was recently talking to my CTO about at AI Box, which is what does it mean when these big AI model companies, instead of trying to make better models, they just focus on like software integrations. Like, I mean, they're going after like the design stack. Like they're going after Figma. Like why do they have to go after Figma? Why couldn't they just make their model better and let Figma or anyone else build like Cloud Design? Like, I mean, it's not, Cloud Design is not that revolutionary, if I'm being honest. Like anyone, I'm sure I sound dumb, but like actually anyone could build it with a team and a little bit of time. Like it's not an insane product. It just does the design unless you visually edit. Lovable basically did it. So Lovable should just do it a little bit better. So like why do they have to go after that? And I think the reason is because they've raised so much insane amounts of money. They want to capture the value at like so many levels of the stack and they just see, look, we have a great product. Before Figma figures out how to do this, we're just going to build our own and disrupt them and take some of their money. So they are kind of like eating up the whole software industry, which is tricky because they also have access to the best models like they haven't released their Claude Mythos you know super model or whatever but they're definitely but they use it internally they've said to work on all their own stuff so it's like they get this little superpower with like the best model and they just like use it to go clone everybody else and then release it to all of us peasants afterwards so yeah I guess I guess that I like a lot less with this but I guess my sentiment is more like Figma should have done this themselves already. And Adobe, if Adobe is listening, you guys need to incorporate chat for every single software you have to do all of the same kind of edits. And also Adobe, if you're listening, you guys should be less of scammers on your pricing model. Absolutely. I think they're gonna have like lawsuits or something against them. And so maybe this changed. But I will say, and I'm just publicly calling them out right now, because it's ridiculous. But Adobe, the way that you guys make it so that if someone does an annual subscription, in order to cancel their annual subscription, they have to pay like $100 cancellation fee. That is the shadiest thing I've ever seen. So I'm sure your bean counters that told you to do that are really happy about the extra money you made. But I am not a fan of your products or your platform or your company because of that. Yeah, so anyways. I'm getting all the hot takes out, but that is shady. Okay. The software is great. Everything else about it's great. Shame on you for the financial element. All right, Jamie, please bring this down to a cooler level headed outro on this episode. Hey, thanks for listening, guys. If you are listening, wherever you're listening, if you could review us, we would really appreciate that. Leave us some stars. Those help us reach more people. I think we're trying to still reach 100 reviews on Apple Podcasts. So we're close. So if you can help us push us over the edge, we would really appreciate that. And again, check out our AI Hustle School community if you want to actually learn how to use some of these tools to make money and grow your business. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. This episode sponsored by Codecademy. Your job is changing fast. New tools, new expectations, and real pressure to keep up. This isn't a someday problem. It's happening right now. That's where Codecademy comes in. Instead of just watching or reading, you learn by doing. From your very first lesson, you're writing real code directly in your browser. No setup, no guesswork. Whether it's AI tools, prompt engineering, data analysis, or cybersecurity, Codecademy shows you exactly what to learn and gives you a clear step-by-step path to get there. 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