How Linear Became a $1.25B Startup in a Crowded Market

Building a product is hard. Most of us start by asking our users what they want, but here’s the problem: your users are lying to you.

They aren’t doing it on purpose. They’re just being polite. They say they’d love a feature, but when you spend months building it, almost nobody uses it.

In my latest video, I break down how Linear ignored standard startup advice to build a $1B company in a "dead" market. I dive into their specific systems for finding the truth and how they use an "Anti-Roadmap" to keep their team fast and high-quality.

[Watch: How Linear Won on YouTube]

The "Floors in the Building" Opening

When Karri Saarinen started Linear, everyone told him it was a bad idea to build another issue tracker. Jira already owned the market.

But Karri saw an opening. He calls it the "Floors in the Building" analogy.

Think about the software your team uses every day. You probably don't love it. It’s slow, clunky, and frustrating. But you use it because it’s just there—like the floor you walk on. You assume it’s permanent, so you stop thinking about how to fix it.

Linear didn't look for a new problem. They looked at a problem everyone had but everyone had given up on.

Stop Listening, Start "Method Acting"

Most UX research gets you nowhere because it relies on hypothetical questions. When you ask, "Would you use this?" people say "Yes" because they want to be helpful (Social Desirability Bias) or because they imagine a perfect version of themselves that has more time than they actually do.

Linear avoids this with "Method Acting." Instead of asking for opinions, they immerse themselves in the workflow. They look for what I call the Detective Framework:

Find the evidence: What spreadsheets have they made to hack a solution together? What tabs do they have open?
Follow the pain: If they aren't already frustrated enough to try and solve the problem themselves, they won't use your feature.
Follow the money: A great indicator of a real pain is that people pay money to fix it.

Opinionated Software needs S-Tier Builders

Most tools try to be everything to everyone. They are flexible sandboxes. Linear is the opposite. It is Opinionated Software.

They don't give you a billion ways to work; they give you one way that works incredibly well.

To build like this, you need S-Tier Builders. I’ve worked with over 100 designers, and the best ones always have three things:

Taste: They have a high bar and produce beautiful work from the start.
Listening: They ask "Why does this matter?" before they start designing.
Handoffs: They care about the developers and the process, not just the pixels.

Linear didn't even have Product Managers for a long time. They trusted engineers and designers with "Product Sense" to make the right calls.

The Anti-Roadmap (Now / Next / Later)

The traditional roadmap is a trap. The moment you publish it, it’s outdated. Rigid deadlines create fake pressure that kills High Agency. Instead of managing dates, I manage outcomes using the Now / Next / Later system:

Now: What we are solving right now with full clarity.
Next: What we’re tackling next. We know the problem, but we're still figuring out the solution.
Later: The big-picture wishlist.

This allows your team to move fast without the stress of arbitrary deadlines. You focus on quality, not just checking boxes.

If you want to try this yourself, I’ve shared my Notion Roadmap Template and my User Interview Script in the description of the video.

[Click here to watch the full video and clone the templates.]

Talk soon,

Nik