Show HN: How Sketch can win looking at there Qualitative Feedback?

There are bigger differences between Sketch and Figma than collaboration &#x2F; web native.<p>According to Crunchbase, Sketch has received 20M of venture funding and has less than 50 employees. This is a rare company that has been largely profitable and an independantly sustainable business.<p>Figma has received over $300M of funding and has over 1000 employees. They burnt cash for years with close to zero revenue trying to get the underlying technology to work. Once they got their tech to work they did the VC funded hyperscale strategy with massive budgets for everything from marketing to community engagement.<p>In order for Sketch build some of the features that Figma has, they need to (1) raise a ton of money (2) forget about short term profitability, (3) burn money for many years (4) hope to get a big exit.<p>That is extremely difficult to execute in the best of times but under the current financial environment, almost impossible. Even if they did execute, they would be chasing another product&#x27;s smoke instead of being a category innovator. Sketch cannot out-Figma Figma at this point. Success for Sketch at this point will look very different from the route that Figma took. We should also recognize that the software world moves quickly. Sketch was a huge success already. The fact that it was overtaken by another success story is very normal in the industry and should not take away from the success that Sketch was in its heyday.

Sketch has to play catch up <i>and</i> get people back to software they already left. I know people who used Sketch for years that don&#x27;t actually know that it has a web app now. They&#x27;ve moved on and aren&#x27;t looking back. Tweeting about Adobe isn&#x27;t going to accomplish much long-term.<p>There&#x27;s an inflection point where a tool becomes part of a de facto industry toolset. If most of your customers and partners use Figma, you do too. Figma&#x27;s reached that point and Sketch has been on the downswing for years. They were rightfully outmaneuvered by Figma, and now Figma has a massive pool of resources on top of that.<p>At this point they&#x27;ll need to do a lot more than copy Figma. Maybe they can luck out if Adobe doesn&#x27;t understand Figma and causes some damage, but I wouldn&#x27;t count on it. Perhaps there&#x27;s some enterprise niche they can start to fill out.

Sketch and Adobe XD are desktop apps for the sole designer. When the designer is ready to share designs, they uploads static images to a website which can be commented by others. Collaborating with other designers (in real-time) is possible through the desktop app.<p>In contrast, Figma overlaps with a tool like Miro. Figma&#x27;s let&#x27;s you create virtual whiteboards, digital post-its, collaborative presentations, and more. For example, a small team of developers could use Figma as a brainstorm&#x2F;meeting record&#x2F;virtual whiteboard. In Figma, no designer presence needed for a myriad of use cases.<p>Sketch will not be able to match Figma&#x27;s much broader user appeal: designers, developers, product managers, project managers, marketing staff. Where does this leave Sketch? I don’t know.

I&#x27;m finishing up a project (as a dev) where the design was delivered in Sketch. This was my first experience with it.<p>I&#x27;m quite happy with it. I use the web version 99% of the time -- it looks like it&#x27;s designed specifically for my use case, and it does an excellent job at it.

“Their”

So, does this mean Sketch once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?