Founding Designer as a Service
Startups often spend 2–4 months hiring a designer, and that gap is more expensive than most founders realize. I close that gap immediately — taking full design ownership and protecting the metrics that matter most while the search continues.
Fully remote — I adapt to your timezone, wherever you're based.
Available 1–4 months.
Most founders underestimate the opportunity cost of that hiring time, not just in velocity, but in the compounding damage to growth, runway, and narrative. While the search runs, product decisions default to founders and engineers. The cost isn't visible at first. It compounds silently:
| Metric | Before Matias | After Matias |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion | Landing pages, onboarding, and in-product flows are usually designed ad hoc by founders or engineers, which weakens clarity and lowers activation and signup efficiency. | Core funnels get intentional UX and stronger visual hierarchy, which improves clarity and supports better conversion performance across signup, onboarding, and activation. |
| Retention | Inconsistent UX, unclear product behavior, and weak first impressions create friction that hurts early retention and makes PMF harder to prove. | A dedicated design owner improves usability, trust, and coherence across the product, which supports stronger retention, engagement, and customer confidence. |
| Time-to-Market | Product teams lose time debating flows, redesigning screens, and rebuilding rushed UI, which slows MVP delivery and feature shipping. | Design decisions move faster, prototypes get validated earlier, and engineers build with more clarity, reducing rework and shortening time-to-market. |
| Support | Poor UX creates preventable confusion, extra hand-holding, and more support tickets from users who cannot complete key tasks smoothly. | Better UX reduces friction and can materially lower support burden; one recruiting benchmark cites up to 90% lower support costs with strong product design. |
Design decisions come from understanding how users arrive, what motivates them, and what the business is trying to achieve. That context is the input.
With that context, I work with the CEO, the team, and the data to improve any experience that moves the needle — user flows, onboarding, core product moments, design system, delivery speed. Whatever is costing the business most.
When your permanent designer starts, I brief them on where everything stands — file infrastructure and the design-business context that took time to build. They hit the ground running.
Defined the design direction from scratch, reducing time-to-market and aligning two competing audiences — which resulted in a revenue stream.
Helped the company scale design maturity from "product chaos" to unified design culture, reducing design debt and accelerating feature delivery.
€450-500 / day
Based on scope and overlap with your team. No hidden fees.
1-3 months
Aligned to your hiring timeline. I hand off when your permanent designer starts.
Simple
Contractor invoice. No EOR, no Deel, no complexity. You hire me like a freelancer — one invoice per month.
Fully remote — I adapt to your timezone, wherever you're based.
20 minutes. Tell me what's happening. We'll figure out together if it makes sense.