Rivet

What do they actually do

Rivet is a visual editor that connects to a team’s real web codebase so product designers can change a running app’s UI and publish those changes as code. Designers select on‑screen elements, adjust spacing, colors, layout, and typography against the app’s actual components and styles, and Rivet generates a clean diff/PR back to the repository for review like any other frontend change YC profile, rivet.design.

Today Rivet is in early access. YC highlights designers at startups (e.g., Item) using it to reduce design handoff cycles and ship polish without waiting on engineers. Rivet describes these features as “visual AI tools” that help translate design intent into reviewable code and integrates with GitHub for PR-based workflows YC profile, rivet.design.

Who are their target customer(s)

• Product designers at software startups: Small visual issues sit in tickets and require engineering time to implement. They want to adjust UI details directly in the live app and ship those changes via the normal code review process without writing code YC profile, rivet.design.
• Design leads owning quality across multiple surfaces: Quality drifts and backlogs accumulate. They need a safe, reviewable way for designers to make production UI edits that generate PRs and don’t bypass engineering workflows YC profile.
• Frontend engineers / eng managers: Time is pulled into implementing UI polish instead of core features. They want designers to handle low‑risk visual tweaks as code, within the same repo and review gates YC profile.
• Design‑system owners: Specs diverge from the live app and visual updates don’t propagate. Editing against the real components and styles, with code diffs, helps enforce consistency rivet.design.
• Small teams/founders with limited frontend bandwidth: UI iteration slows when developers are unavailable. They need designers to quickly fix layout/spacing/typography issues and merge changes via PRs YC profile.

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Concierge pilots with YC startups and early signups. Pair a Rivet team member with each design team to make real edits in their app and ship PRs, capturing before/after time saved and one case study per team YC profile.
• First 50: Convert referrals and run targeted outreach to design leads at growth‑stage startups with short emails linking to concrete case studies; offer a limited free trial and white‑glove setup. Host small workshops in designer communities/Slack and demo editing a participant’s product end‑to‑end rivet.design.
• First 100: Scale inbound with practical content (video walkthroughs, step‑by‑step case studies) and partnerships with design‑tool communities/consultancies. Add a light self‑serve trial with an onboarding checklist and templates for common design‑system fixes; keep PR‑based delivery for trust rivet.design.

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Using design‑tool seat pricing as a proxy, the global product/UX designer population is commonly estimated in the low millions (some public posts cite ~2.2M UX pros), suggesting a designer‑focused TAM in the low hundreds of millions to about $1B ARR depending on price and eligibility example LinkedIn post, Figma pricing.

Bottom-up calculation:

Conservative: 1.0M designers × $12/mo ≈ $144M ARR. Mid: 1.5M × $16/mo ≈ $288M ARR. Aggressive: 2.2M × $35/mo ≈ $924M ARR. If Rivet later sells to developers, global developer counts in the tens of millions imply multi‑billion ARR potential at low per‑seat pricing Figma pricing, SlashData 2025 est. ~47M developers.

Assumptions:

• Counts refer to designers working on production web apps, not all graphic/brand roles.
• Per‑seat pricing benchmarked to Figma Dev/Full seats ($12–$55+ per seat monthly, plan‑dependent) not Rivet’s actual price Figma pricing.
• Framework/support coverage and team size mix will affect adoption and realized ARPU.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Plasmic: Open‑source visual builder that integrates with React codebases so teams can build pages and apps with their own components and data. Used to empower non‑devs while keeping codebase integration Plasmic site, GitHub.
• Builder.io: Visual editor/CMS that lets teams edit experiences using code components and integrates with existing stacks; supports PR workflows and AI‑assisted edits Visual Editor, Docs.
• UXPin Merge: Design with real, coded components from a repo/Storybook so prototypes match production, improving handoff and consistency with code‑backed UI Merge overview, tutorial.
• Anima: AI design‑to‑code platform converting Figma designs into React/HTML/Vue and providing iteration and VS Code integration for handoff acceleration Homepage, Figma to code.
• Zeplin: Design delivery/handoff platform that organizes finalized designs, specs, and flows for developers with integrations and code snippets—commonly used alongside Figma Zeplin.