We were lucky enough to sit down with about 100 amazing designers this way — (and thanks to you all! You’re awesome 🤗) and also grateful to have visited some of the world’s best design teams, who were kind enough to invite us into their offices for a demo.

Many designers turned out for demo meetups on this first beta. Eventually, some designers in the community even became the first Phase ambassadors, demo’ing the Beta v1 in their local cities with in self-organized events, like the one pictured below.

Bartek, the first Phase Ambassador, showing the Beta v1 at Silesia Dribbble Meetup

So all good… right? Well, some of it was.

The feedback from this Beta v1 can basically be summed up as: “The demos were awesome, I’m so excited! 🎉 But when I tried to use it myself later, it broke. Too many bugs.”

Now the number of bugs in Phase Beta v1 were on par for this type of manual, private, earliest beta testing. Nothing special about them: we could have fixed them, stabilized the Beta v1, and gotten it released — ⎋.

However the deeper we dug into these bugs the more it became clear that actually, we had a more fundamental, tougher question to answer beyond the bugs.

Thinking Deep on ⁍ Long-Term Tech

So what was that tough question?

It wasn’t about the bugs, really. We could fix those, one way or another, and widely release a stable edition of Beta v1 to everyone (and that stable Beta v1 would have been a great app, for awhile).

No… the tough question wasn’t the bugs themselves.

The tough question was: is the core tech ready to build upon? Can we add Deep-Component Libraries on top of this? Or the Layout Model? Can Version Control sit on top of what we have built? How about Custom Effects? How about… all the rest?

The answer we had to admit was, no. The Beta v1 could be bug fixed and “made to work” short-term, but the underlying structure would grind us to a disappointing halt, eventually.

If you only understand one thing about building products, you must understand that energy put in early in the process pays off tenfold and energy put in at the end of the program pays off negative tenfold.

— Ben Horowitz

Too many negative tenfold-obstacles stared us down.

When we dug in and thought deeply about what shipping everything we and our community had envisioned beyond v1 would really look like, we realized it meant needing to invest in rebuilding a new, different, and ultimately better foundation.

So with the Beta v1 already in-hand, we had a choice to make:

(1) Bugfix ± Ship the Beta v1 Now

To which we thought, “Well, crap… If we bug-fix then ship Beta v1 it’ll be a good app with good, dynamic prototyping features. It’ll be a great way for designers’ to work in prototyping, and it will grab its 15-minutes of fame on the conveyor-belt of new design tools… but then, it’ll tap out… a few months from now it’ll become just another broken-promises design tool with stalled progress, failing to deliver.”

(2) Restart, Rip-Out, and Rewrite en Route to ⇥ Beta v2 ♲

To which we then thought, “Well, double-crap… if we delay it… if we don’t ship on time, then Phase still looks like just another broken-promises design tool… oh, and triple-crap, before deciding this we of course already told everyone we’d fix the Beta v1 bugs and open the beta ‘in a few weeks’.”