The empty state is the first impression
Most people meet your product with nothing in it. Design for that screen first.
Every product is designed full. The screenshots in the pitch deck have forty rows of tidy data, three charts and a profile photo in the corner. Then a real person signs up, and what they see is a blank page with a button.
Start with nothing
On my last team we made a rule: no screen is finished until its empty state is. That meant writing the sentence a new person reads before they have done anything, and deciding what the one next step is.
It changed the work. An empty state forces you to say what the screen is for, in a line, to someone who has no reason to trust you yet.
Three questions
What will be here once there is something?
Why would I want it?
What is the one thing I do now?
If the screen answers those, the button almost writes itself.