Play

Dan Lasa Vita and three co-founders—Michael, June, and Eric—came from Firstborn, a digital design agency they'd built into a powerhouse generating around $27-28 million in annual revenue across 100 employees before selling to Dentsu in 2012. After leaving Dentsu in 2019, they spotted a critical gap in the design tool market. While platforms like Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch had become industry standards, none of them were built specifically for mobile designers. "They're sort of a mile wide," Dan explains. "There is not really a platform built for people designing specifically for mobile products." The pain point was visceral: designers had to work around native iOS capabilities like video players, modals, haptics, and live maps—creating prototypes and hacks instead of designing with the actual components they'd ship.

The four founders bootstrapped the early days with $1 million of their own capital, with Michael putting in the lion's share. This allowed them to hire from day one rather than bootstrap in the traditional sense. They spent time building Figma import capability—recognizing that designers wouldn't abandon their design systems and wanted Play as a complement, not a replacement. The team launched the iOS app at the end of 2021 (Q3) as an invite-only product on the App Store, immediately seeing strong signals. Within months, they had 30,000 people on the waitlist.

The early adopter story reveals the power of product-market fit. By mid-2022, Play had 11,000 app installs and around 4,500 users with full access. The retention metrics were exceptional: cohorts emerging at 5-7 weeks showed 80-85% retention—meaning users weren't just kicking the tires, they were actively designing and building. In the past month alone, the product saw 650,000 individual actions across those active users (roughly 144 actions per user per month). Most critically, growth came entirely through word-of-mouth. As Dan noted: "It seems to be more word of mouth of people who have used the product, tried the product, and then it makes its way through the kind of the VC channels." VCs would call saying, "I know a product designer at [company], a few of their designers are using it, and now it's on my radar."

One of Dan's smartest moves was listening obsessively to power users. The cohorts of retained users revealed that their top feature request was iPad support—so the team doubled down and launched iPad that month. They also discovered that designers were stuck on phones designing in the native environment, where they could leverage iOS's real gestures, video players, and haptics instead of faking them on desktop. The team committed significant effort to SOC 2 compliance (using Vanta) early, recognizing that enterprise penetration would require it. "If you're going to save $2,000, but it's going to cost you another $10,000 of manpower, I'd rather pay the two grand," Dan explained. With 12 engineers on a 20-person team, they were heavily weighted toward product velocity.

Play raised a $3 million pre-seed round in late 2020/early 2021 on a $15 million post-money valuation cap, then followed up with a $6.1 million seed in April 2022 led by First Round Capital's Todd Jackson. The seed valued the company in the "tens of millions" (likely around $30-40 million post-money). At the time of the interview, Play was pre-revenue but burning approximately $350-400K per month with about 24 months of runway. Dan had no plans to sell at a $50 million valuation (a 1.25X premium on the seed), saying "I think we may need more than that to get off the highway." The plan was to introduce monetization that year with a freemium model—free tier, individual paid tier, and enterprise tier—following the playbook of other design tools. The early data suggested the business had significant room to grow: only iPad had shipped, other platforms were planned, and the 30,000 waitlist was still being batched in slowly.