Benoit

"Amazing execution, Not a single issue nor confusion from customers!!!!! You guys are setting the bar super high!!!! ❤️ 🤩 ! Thank you so much for thiss!!" VP Customer Support, Apollo.io for work done by @pixel1studio

8 SF-based founders we worked with ended up creating unicorns. Here’s how they delegate design with peace of mind. A SF-based founder in ed tech hired us because he was preparing the launch of his new platform. He came in with a general sense of what was wrong. He was also spread thin. In the weeks before a launch he’s talking to customers, setting the roadmap, helping engineers get unblocked on product vision, replying to customer tickets, and trying to get marketing to land at the same time as the product. Guess what else was on his plate. Design. So on top of all of that, he was trying to think through complex user flows. A customer has multiple accounts and wants a single view to manage everything. A customer needs to track a learner with more granularity. He could have figured these out. He’s figured out harder things. But every hour on a user flow was an hour cut from something else on that list, and nothing on that list was optional. That’s the whole reason we were in the room. He didn’t need to hand us a spec. He handed us the two flows and his general sense of what was wrong, and his part became deciding on what came back instead of producing it. Those two flows were on our plate the next morning. His list was still long. It was just one line shorter, and that line was the only one someone else could carry.

A founder of a profitable US-based company hired us 6 years ago to design their internal software. We’re still their design team. Here’s what we’ve been doing to keep a client for 6 years. He wanted software that would run his operations across the company and all of their franchises. He knew the problem. He knew software was the solution. What he was missing was how to connect the two. His industry is one most people have never heard of. Very technical, lots of processes, lots of documents. So we needed to get deep right from the get go. Honestly, our first meeting was hard to follow. Not the ideas, the terminology. All new terms, or familiar terms with a completely different meaning attached to them in his world. It took us slightly longer than most engagements to really get it. We also didn’t have the experience we have now. But we got it. And then the tables started to turn. For the first stretch he was driving the problem definition and we were designing against it. Slowly that flipped. We had gathered enough knowledge about his operations that we could define the problems ourselves, and do it confidently enough that he let us. 6 years in, AI entered the scene. So we changed how we work again, so he keeps getting the benefit without having to re-explain anything to anyone. He spent the first months teaching us his industry. He hasn’t had to since. Everything we’ve changed in 6 years, including how we use AI, was changed so he wouldn’t have to.

Using claude motion to create even more compelling UIs.

In the last 5 calls I’ve had with prospecting founders over the past 2 weeks, I’m seeing the same misconception about how AI can be used to accelerate design velocity. Here’s why your founder-led design is weak. I was recently on a call with the VP of Product at a SF-based finance company and his team. We were walking them through how we use AI to increase our velocity. Pretty quickly they started agreeing with us. They were doing something similar: put the requirements in Claude, ask it to generate multiple ideas, see what comes out. Then the honest part. They didn’t feel like they were getting great ideas or great output, so they weren’t doing it consistently. It got used sporadically, whenever it made sense. That’s not a process. A process should always improve the outcome, every time you run it, or it isn’t one. What they had was a tool they reached for when they were stuck. And I think the reason it wasn’t working is simple. Design is a series of decisions, each one weighing pros and cons. AI gives you a real leg up on those decisions because it gives you more information, more options, faster. What it can’t do is make the decisions for you. The moment you ask it to, you’re outsourcing the one part that was never outsourceable. It’s why “build me a $100M business, make no mistakes” is an online joke. AI can absolutely help you build a $100M business. It just can’t do all of it for you. Design works exactly the same way. Where we landed on that call was the same tool, used differently. We don’t ask it for the answer. We ask it for everything we’d need to make the decision ourselves, and we run it that way on every feature, not just the hard ones.

Version 179 and I’m still going. This is what a designer’s afternoon looks like. If you’re a founder, it probably shouldn’t be yours. Even though it’s a lot of fun.

We’ve worked with 150+ founders, and 8 of them created $1B+ companies. Here’s how a design team that doesn’t sit in your office ends up reinforcing how your company works. One of those founders we’ve worked with for more than 7 years. He’s on his third company, with billions of dollars in exits behind him, and he is very diligent about who he hires. He knows the company only works if the people in it share its values, so he recruits strictly for them. Some of those values carry over from the company he exited to the one he’s building now, because they’re that fundamental to how he wins. One of them is ownership. Not owning your tasks, owning the process and the outcome end to end. And when he brings in an external resource, he runs the exact same evaluation. Do these people have the values that fit the company? Not just the skills. Values first. So we got held to the same bar as every hire he’s made. We own the work end to end: if something isn’t working we flag it, we don’t wait to be told, and the outcome is on us, not on whoever briefed us. Honestly, I think that’s where the reinforcing happens. When people from outside the company walk in already living the same values as the people inside, it tells the team those values aren’t just the founder’s preference. They’re what actually works. External validation that feeds the internal one. 7 years, 3 companies, and we’ve never been treated as a vendor. We got in the same way as everyone on his team: by passing the values test first.

A founder for a US-based, seed funded developer company came to us for a website redesign. Here’s how we reinvigorated their brand in preparation for their product launch. As always, we started with research. And in their case the research came back with one very clear finding: every one of their competitors was using the same design aesthetic. Same look, same feel, from one site to the next. Branding is really about showing what’s unique about your company. When the whole category looks alike, there’s a big opportunity in being the one that doesn’t. So that’s the direction we brought to the team. They were receptive to it, and we got to work. What we built was a small world. Calm, trustworthy, and giving users a sense of relief. Those were the three emotional values they wanted to put forward, and every choice in the brand, from the palette to the pacing of the pages, was there to serve one of them. We’re excited to add this one to the case studies. More shots coming soon.

We worked with a SF-based founder who reached $30M ARR in under 18 months, and engineering built it the way we designed it. Here’s how we get set up in 3 days and deliver value in 2 weeks. A founder friend on his second venture, after an exit on the first, reached out recently. He needed some additional design help. They’ve been doing great. They just have so many things that need to get shipped, and they want to launch fast. Who doesn’t. On the discovery call we found out how the work actually moves. Everything gets produced in Figma. Those assets get sent over to engineering. Engineering interprets them, comes back to the designers with questions, the designers modify, and it goes around again. And in a lot of cases the designs don’t carry all the product constraints, so things get missed. So our first job isn’t a feature. It’s moving everything onto Claude Design, and we’re trying to get it done in under a week. I’m writing this on day 3, and it looks like we’ll hit it. For us, that same switch took designing certain features from 3 weeks down to a single day. I’m super excited to see what it does to their velocity. This is what an outside team is for. Not more hands on the same process, a different process, brought in from somewhere it’s already working, and applied in days instead of quarters. Three days in, the setup is almost done. By next week the same team is designing in a day what used to take three weeks, and they didn’t have to stop shipping to get there.

Currently reading Steve Jobs in Exile. Well, listening, since it's the audiobook. Highly recommend. It's not your typical biography. It focuses on the part of his life after he was ousted from Apple and started NeXT, which was a failure. Fascinating story. You read it knowing it's going to fail, but somehow you never quite manage to anticipate why.

If I was Figma right now, I'd be very, very worried. We just cancelled our enterprise plan, and I just can't see how they recover from this. If you don't know what I'm talking about, spend a few minutes with Claude Design. On the flip side, I'm SO excited about how much more Claude Design is going to let designers do. It changed almost overnight for us. A few months ago we made a hard pivot and stopped using Figma completely in favor of Claude Design, and there's no way we could go back now.

Saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway, again. The first time was in 2019, back when it was 2 parts and a crazy 6 hours long. They've since trimmed it down to 3. And I feel like I finally understood the play. Sometimes by saying less, you communicate more. Less is more, even for Harry Potter.

We redesigned the onboarding for a $150M SF-based fintech and sped up activation by 50%, mostly by adding delight. When leaders at this fintech came to us to design their onboarding, they set one key requirement from the start: it had to feel delightful. Beyond making it functionally seamless, that meant creating something that actually inspired joy. There was a business objective underneath. The tasks we were asking their users to complete were tedious, and the idea was to increase engagement and activation by adding delight to them. Delight doesn’t come with a spec. It’s a feeling, so the only way to design it is to really get what it’s for. For us, that meant understanding why each of those tedious steps was there before deciding how it should feel. So we worked closely with their team to find meaningful, fun ways to illustrate the information their users needed to understand. Every moment that could have felt like paperwork got a reason to smile instead. The launch was a success. The requirement was a feeling. What came out of it was a number: activation sped up by 50%.

An SF-based Series B company came to us to clear a few items off their roadmap. 3 years later, we’re still on their design team. Here’s how an external design team can bridge the gap between your roadmap and reality. A second-time founder hopped on a call with me this week. They just got amazing brand work done by an agency, and now they need to bring it into the product. They have a staff product designer building the flows and UI, and the founder is very happy with his work. The problem is the backlog. There’s just too much for one person, and it’s become a bottleneck for the whole company. Features aren’t shipping when they should. He’d worked with me before, so he already trusted we could ramp up fast. And that’s really the pitch. We’ve designed flows like these 150 times before. Every product still needs its own answer, but that experience helps us get to the right decisions faster. Because of how we staff, we can also put more people on it at the start, catch up on the entire backlog, and scale back after. The brand is done and the product already has a designer who knows it. What the roadmap needs now is a team that can start making the right calls this month.

We've recently worked with a SF-based co-founder of a popular AI infrastructure startup ($5M seed, $50M ARR). Here's how we increased activation by owning the experience end to end. They came to us because their company was growing fast. Very fast. Yet they were still missing a big group of customers they really needed. They already had a sense of where the problems were. Some were in the onboarding, inside the product. Others happened before users even signed up, on the website. But these founders were incredibly busy, and digging into it properly was something they didn't have time to do. So that became our job. We brought in our visual design and product design teams to audit both surfaces. They quickly found some of the key problems, in the navigation and in the onboarding. We ran the whole thing with minimal supervision, so they didn't need to handhold us. Their focus stayed on the company, and ours stayed on this. That's what owning the experience end to end looks like. The same people looked at what users hit before signing up and after, so nothing fell between the website and the product. All they gave us was a sense of where the problems were. Everything after that was on us, and it just went live with positive signals already coming in.

A YC-backed, Toronto-based founder brought us in to design the product launch for their Series A construction software company. We delivered it in 8 weeks. Here’s how we got up to speed in an industry that was completely new to us. They came to us right after raising their Series A, as they prepared a product launch. Their corner of construction, pre-construction, is a very complicated space, and the tool, the users, all of it was new to us. So we went deep. We got our hands on all the material they could share, which for them was sales calls and demos. And we used AI to ask questions and fill in the gaps. That got us a long way, but it wasn’t enough. Sales calls and demos show how a product gets sold, not how the work actually gets done. So we got an expert on board, a customer who actually uses the product, and asked them everything we still didn’t understand. That’s where the key information came from. And we got it without needing to pull the founder in, which right after a Series A is super important. With that, we designed a first version of the product. We iterated on it quickly, and that first version is basically what made it to final delivery, on their existing design system. The industry was completely new to us when we started. 8 weeks later, the launch was a success, and they asked us to design their website and help with their second product.

We've been working with an SF-based three-time founder on his third company. He raised $110M in six months. Here's how an external design resource can end up continuously owning design. It started small. Their head of marketing kept us on retainer to maintain and update the website. They already had in-house designers setting the art direction and some of the elements of the site. So our job was pretty clear: keep the website up to date within what their team had set. As we worked together, they came to us with more and more requests on how we could help with the updates. Then they asked for something bigger: a templatized system their team could use internally to build event pages, with little to no supervision. We went beyond the brief and built templates that covered more than they expected. To do that, our team had to understand their website through and through, so they could trust what we handed over. That's just how we work. And that's how the whole thing grew. Every time a request was done well, the next one got a little bigger. We built the templates so their team could create event pages without us. This week, they asked us to design from the ground up the event pages.