Founding Designer
as a Service

Fix what's hurting your growth — while you hire.

I work with early-stage founders to find what's slowing growth — and fix it. While your hiring process runs in parallel, we close the loop together. When your permanent designer is ready, I hand off a system that's already working.

Available for 1–3 month engagements · Remote · Check rate ↓

Hiring a designer takes 2–4 months.
Your product can't wait.

Churn from friction

Users don't send support tickets when the product is confusing. They just leave.

Slower shipping

Without a designer in the room, product decisions default to whoever has the most time — rarely the right input.

Harder fundraising story

Investors can feel when a product lacks design coherence. It shows up in the room.

Every product has a design problem.
It usually shows up as a growth problem.

Acquisition

Landing pages built around the metric, not the aesthetic

We look at where people drop before they convert — and redesign from there. Homepage, pricing page, sign-up flow.

Activation

Onboarding that gets users to value faster

Together we map where users get lost before they see the point. Then we remove what's in the way.

Retention

Core flows users actually want to come back to

We identify what makes your product sticky — and design around that, not around what looks good in a deck.

Churn

Exit points diagnosed before they cost you

We trace churn back to specific product moments. Understanding why someone leaves is usually more valuable than guessing what to build next.

Results

Staking Rewards

Staff Product Designer · Remote · 2024–2026

Led design across the Stake App and marketing surfaces. Built the design system from scratch, cutting time-to-market in half. Redesigned global navigation and launched the Verified Staking Providers platform — which generated an unplanned revenue stream within 3 days of launch.

-50%

Time-to-market

-37%

Dead clicks

+15%

Stake Leads

+12%

Retention

Lodgify

Founding Designer · Barcelona · 2014–2024 · Employee #8

Joined as the founding designer and built the practice alongside the product and engineering teams — design system, website builder, and culture. Worked with PMs across Messaging, Payments, and Analytics to move metrics that had been stuck.

9%0%

Churn · Messaging

0%28%

Revenue · Payments

10%46%

Adoption · Analytics

Diagnose. Execute. Measure.

01

Diagnose

Before opening Figma, I spend time with your metrics, your team, and your users. The real problem is rarely what it looks like on the surface — and building the wrong thing faster doesn't help.

02

Execute

Once we know what to solve, I work directly with your engineers, talk to customers, and ship. Full ownership of the design side — without you having to manage the process.

03

Measure

I don't leave when the design is done. I leave when we can see what moved — the metric before I arrived, and the metric after.

Simple model. No surprises.

Rate

€450-500 / day

Based on scope and overlap with your team. No hidden fees.

Duration

1-3 months

Aligned to your hiring timeline. I hand off when your permanent designer starts.

Contract

Simple

Contractor invoice. No EOR, no Deel, no complexity. You hire me like a freelancer.

Not sure if this makes sense
for your situation?

20 minutes. Tell me what's happening. I'll tell you honestly if I can help — and how.

Book a 20-min call

work@matiasrizzo.com