Funnel teardown: Framer (Design and prototyping)
Founder(s): Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk

Framer's funnel runs on the design-to-publish-without-engineering positioning. The marketing sells the moment when a Figma-style design becomes a live site.

TL;DR: Framer's funnel works because the marketing pivots the design tool category. The hero leads with 'design and publish' — the implicit promise that your design work goes live without engineering handoff. The lesson for indie founders: when an incumbent (Figma) owns the category default, the New Opportunity move is to claim an adjacent category (design-plus-publish) the incumbent cannot enter without abandoning its identity.

What they sell: A design-and-publish platform that lets designers ship live marketing sites and landing pages without engineering handoff.
Who it's for: Designers building marketing sites and landing pages who want to publish their design work directly without coding or engineering involvement.
Pricing: Free tier; Mini ~$5/site/mo; Basic ~$15/site/mo; Pro ~$30/site/mo (verified 2026-05-18). Plus seat-based design tier pricing.

Hook pattern: Adjacent-category claim
The hero claims design-plus-publish as a distinct category rather than competing with Figma on design alone. This works because designers have lived through the design-engineering-handoff loop and recognize the friction; the alternative (design-to-publish in one tool) is immediately attractive. The hook compresses category evaluation by reframing the comparison from 'Framer vs Figma' to 'Framer vs the handoff loop.'

Story pattern: Design-output-as-marketing flywheel
Story is told through customer case studies featuring distinctive Framer-built sites. The output is visibly different from Webflow-built sites (more designer-led, fewer marketing-CMS conventions), which creates a recognizable Framer aesthetic. Every Framer-built site is implicit advertising to designers who recognize the aesthetic and want it for themselves.

Offer pattern: Per-site pricing with design-tier seat add-on
The pricing structure separates publishing (per-site) from designing (per-seat). This matches the value-capture moments — publishing is when the design becomes live; designing is the ongoing collaborative work. Per-site pricing aligns with the publishing value; per-seat aligns with the design value. The bifurcation works because designers usually own publishing decisions.

What's working:
Adjacent-category positioning escapes the Figma category fight entirely.|Design-output-as-marketing flywheel — every Framer-built site is implicit advertising.|Designer-native editing experience matches the Figma-style workflows the target audience already knows.|Per-site pricing aligns with the publishing value-capture moment rather than the design-time value.|Native CMS for blog posts and dynamic pages handles the marketing-site content needs without external CMS.|Animation and interaction capabilities (Framer Motion legacy) differentiate from static-only competitors.

What to adapt:
When an incumbent owns the category default, claim an adjacent category the incumbent cannot enter without abandoning its identity.|Design-output-as-marketing flywheel works when your product creates recognizable visible output that the target audience encounters in normal life.|Bifurcated pricing (per-site for publish, per-seat for design) matches multi-value-capture-moment products better than single-axis pricing.

What to avoid:
Do not claim an adjacent category if you cannot serve it credibly. Framer's design-plus-publish claim works because the publish capability is real; competitors that promise this and fail to deliver lose the positioning quickly.|Do not pursue per-site pricing if your platform cost does not actually scale with sites. The model only works when each site represents a value moment worth capturing.

Brunson lens:
Hook: New Opportunity hook (Brunson Expert Secrets) — Framer claims design-plus-publish as a category distinct from design alone.
Story: Output-as-marketing flywheel — Framer-built sites are the case studies and the advertising simultaneously.
Offer: Bifurcated pricing matching publishing and design value-capture moments separately.
Value ladder tier: Front-end free tier plus per-site publishing tiers plus per-seat design tier; bifurcated value ladder.