I think the better strategy is to infuse your organization with design thinking. AirBnB has been one of YC's best recent performers and 2/3 of their founding te

I think the better strategy is to infuse your organization with design thinking. AirBnB has been one of YC's best recent performers and 2/3 of their founding team are designers. To quote Steve Jobs: In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. So if your goal is to make something consumer facing or where the user is key in your thinking don't use a professional designer, make one a co-founder. I think design is wildly underutilized and 1 good design hire can be worth 5-10 engineers at the early stage. This may sound heretical, but a good designer can make UX decisions that have massive impact across a site, but piggy back on pre-existing engineering tasks. This doesn't scale though. 10 designers aren't equal to 10 engineers. That said, if you are creating some B2B product that doesn't have a lot of meaningful user interaction, the value exchange is simple, or there aren't a lot of competitive solutions (web or otherwise) then piece something together via woothemes and 99 designs, or make friends with a good designer.