[peteforde]

This is fantastically bad advice, unless you're working on a weekend project and don't care about traction.

I would counter that a simple concept executed with design thinking informing the development is both practical and far more likely to succeed than yet another random solo developer's SaaS.

The problem is that there's two issues at play: the visual theme elements and the user experience. Sure, go ahead and buy a $14 theme if that gets you the head start you need to start working on solving a real problem for someone.

Except that's where the hard work begins. It's not your ability to style INPUT elements that is being tested, but your product vision and how people move through a workflow that is easy to understand.

In the early days of a SaaS, design and copy are probably 75% of the hard work in a MVP. Find me a successful startup that wishes they'd spend less energy on design thinking and just written more code and I'll revisit my perspective.

Otherwise I'll make the statement that any idea which doesn't deserve the attention of a design thinker is not likely to get off the ground because it's statistically not solving a hair-on-fire problem anyhow. Put differently: there's projects and there's start-ups. Start-ups are hard. If you're going to start-up, your future users appreciate you thinking about how your product makes them feel.