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

I think some of the hardest part of our work with founders is to figure out something that really represents the brand without leaning too much into things that already exist. This one is turning out well.

We’ve worked with 150+ founders, and the most common setup we walk into is one designer, 15 engineers, and nobody doing the thinking. If your designer is “really good at pumping functional UI” but your NPS keeps sliding, here’s where the thinking went. A head of product reached out recently, even though they have a designer. He likes working with him. That resource is just spread thin. He’s managing a team that’s mostly engineers. That makes sense to an extent, their key product is an API. But he’s also the one seeing all the customer tickets, and one of their products is ridden with complaints and UX issues. So on a team that’s engineering led, the people deciding what gets built are engineers. Which means the person drawing becomes a production resource. Someone who executes, instead of someone who can take a flow from end to end. And honestly, that’s understandable. When the tickets arrive already decided, there’s no time to explore ideas or break down the jobs to be done. It’s not the first time we see this. A lot of the founders we work with built a big engineering org before design was part of the equation. From a founder’s perspective it makes sense: customers ask me for X, engineers are the best way to build X, so I tell them what X is and they build X. Nobody stopped to ask whether Y was a better solution. And now that AI has raised the bar for everyone, having someone own your experience end to end matters more than how many features you ship. This head of product has 1 designer, 15 engineers, and a folder full of customer recordings and conversations that nobody has time to go through. The designer ships every day. The complaints are still in the folder.

We recently helped a SF-based VP of Marketing at a $110M-funded company launch 29 new pages on the last day of their quarter. Then they asked for something different: "help us institutionalize consistency." If your marketing site accumulates "messaging debt" every quarter, here's the process we set up so it stops. We've been working with this team for over a year and a half. They move extremely fast for a company of their size, and every quarter we set the goals we need to hit. Last quarter was different. We moved fast, and design debt, content debt and discrepancies were starting to creep in. Part of it was the site evolving. The older pages covered all the different things this company does, but in a general way. As we built dedicated pages for each of those things, with the specifics on them, the older pages started to be redundant, and in places the two contradicted each other. So he asked us for two things. An audit of the website, to find the discrepancies. And more importantly, to own the flow end to end on how we prevent this from happening again. It was about leveling up the content and the design, honestly. But it was also about making sure that strategically, as we keep moving this fast, the site stays coherent without anyone having to reread it every week. 29 pages on the last day of Q3 is the kind of thing a design team does. Being asked how to keep all of them telling the same story is the kind of thing you ask a team that's been inside the product for a year and a half.

We redesigned the website of a developer platform shortly before it was acquired by Databricks. A SF-based Series A founder in the same space came to us for his website redesign ahead of a product launch. If you’re a developer tools founder whose site looks like your competitors’, here’s the direction we took. The developer space is very paradoxical. On one hand, developers are some of the most creative people you’ll meet, with lots of ideas. On the other hand, when it comes to their marketing, they love relegating to the tried and true. So most platforms end up looking the same. And from a brand perspective, that’s always a net negative. This founder wanted to uplift their image ahead of new product launches. We started where we always start, with a competitive audit, and it came back with one finding: most players in the space looked the same. A Vercel-like, Stripe-like, Linear-like website every time. The same companies competing on features were doubling down by looking identical. So we suggested a different approach. Something that looked unique, but still projected their brand values: calm, serenity and trust. We took inspiration from several Japanese artists whose work carries exactly those values, and created serene, immersive landscapes with a custom texture applied to them. The texture comes from a mix of brush work and a bit of secret sauce. Those illustrations set the tone for the rest of the brand. They complement the UI screens, and they carry the more text-heavy parts of the website too. Their competitors are still competing on features and looking the same. This brand projects calm, serenity and trust from the first screen, and nobody’s going to confuse it with a Vercel template.

A SF-based Series A founder we've worked with for a year rewrote our pitch for us: "As the founder you're the expert on the product, but with your split attention, you can never give the design the thought and attention it needs." If that's you, here's how we give design the attention it needs while you keep the attention where it belongs. This founder came to us from a referral. We were casually discussing how the collaboration was going overall, which we always do because we're always looking for ways to improve, and he said something that struck me. I always assumed that the founders who hire us want us to own the entire product end to end. The truth is they don't mind if we do, but that's not the problem they're hiring for. Their problem is the specifics. They want us to own specific flows and get every detail in those flows right. And to get those details right, you have to know the entire product, because most flows end up touching other surfaces of the product anyway. In his words: "If I design a feature, it may be poorly-designed in whatever way, but the only thing I almost always get right is that it always fits the whole product really well, because I'm the best expert on the whole product." So that's really our job. We know the product well enough to get the details right. A year in, every flow we've touched got the thought and attention it needed. He hasn't had to worry about a single one of those details, because that attention is ours to give now, not his.

I billed 10,014 hours as a solo freelancer before building an 18-person team. A Miami-based head of product came to me this month and asked for “one person, minimal overhead” instead of a team. If you want a hands-on partner who can “challenge the brief” without the coordination cost, here’s when one designer is the right answer and when it isn’t. I’ve worked with him before. Back then it was just the two of us, jamming on problems and finding solutions. He could talk to me directly and we’d brainstorm together, even when the brief was fuzzy and the solution was vague. That’s what he wants back. And now that there’s a team, he’s scared of losing that direct contact with the people doing the work, with someone sitting between him and them. I really get that. It’s exactly what I looked at when I started Pixel One. I reverse-engineered my top engagements from those 10,014 hours, and that became our playbook. As you may already guess, the highly rated ones had one thing in common: I had a direct line to the decision maker. So that stayed. Nobody sits between the founder and the designer doing the work. The less known part is the other thing those engagements had in common. More often than not, there was more than one designer on the team. Someone to throw ideas to, to get feedback from and give feedback to. So for a fuzzy brief and a founder who wants to jam, one designer with a direct line is exactly right. What he and I never had as two people was the second designer. He and I jammed as two. The best engagements from those 10,014 hours were three: a decision maker, a designer, and another designer to throw ideas to. That’s the team.

A SF-based vertical SaaS founder raised a $10M Series A after we designed his product. The part we're proudest of came later: a consumer app, and it felt like the same product from day one. If you're a founder about to build a second product on top of your first, here's what made that possible. We worked closely with their team on appointment setting. It was the most valuable part of the platform, for our client and for their users. And everything in it was set by a human. Painfully so. Someone on the phone, holding routes, technicians and time slots in their head, one booking at a time. So we built an engine that automated bookings with no human involved. We spent a lot of time trying to get it right, and after a while we did. That's when it got interesting. Once nobody needed to set an appointment by hand, there were product opportunities that hadn't existed before in that field, because the complexity of appointment setting had always been in the way. A consumer app was one of them. So we built their mobile app. Self-serve, for their customers' customers. It was only possible because you didn't need to talk to a human anymore. The engine was already there, and so were the foundations, so the app came together as the same product, just in a new place. For him, it meant a new line of value for his users, and a product his competitors couldn't copy by adding a feature, because it sits on top of something they'd have to build first.

A SF-based Series B founder we'd worked with before hired us in 24 hours last week. A design hire was months out and the backlog had "blown past the deadline." If you're waiting on a hire while your roadmap isn't shipping, here's what a stop-gap month should look like. He texted me late in the evening asking if we could chat. We got on a call the next morning and he showed me the backlog. They had a design resource, and they were still months behind on multiple design projects they wanted to ship. We had just wrapped a project, so luckily we had availability. I oversee every project but I don't do IC work on all of them. On this one, with the number of items and his timeline, I knew I had to be in it. So we structured the team with 3 people: me as design director, a lead designer and a senior product designer. First on our list, before any screens: move everything to Claude Design, and get the tasks out of the giant Excel sheet they were living in. Their team was already in Linear, so that's where the design tasks went too. We don't use Linear ourselves, but it's better than Excel, and more importantly the line between design and engineering gets blurred on a project like this, so it makes sense for everyone to be in the same tool. And honestly, we're already coming in as new partners. We all need to learn how to work together, and I didn't want to add any more friction than that. We'd blocked a full week for setup. Given what was on the list, being properly set up was worth a week, for the velocity it would give us over the rest of the month. It took 3 days. So we picked up our first flow that same week and delivered a version on the Friday. Week 2, as I'm typing this, is 3 flows. We're halfway through and on track to complete all 3, plus a few more. In the meantime, they made progress on their hiring and brought in another in-house designer. They just didn't have to stop shipping to do it.

Something changed this week in the conversations I'm having about AI, and I think it changed most for companies whose main value was a UI on top of a database. Data got cheap and valuable at the same time. If yours is proprietary, it's worth a lot more than it was, and I think it's going to get harder to access from the outside. But if your product was just a better way to reach data, that's a hard place to be now. An agent gets to the same data faster than any human clicking through a UI, and does something with it faster too. So what's left is the data itself, and the two things AI still can't do for you: think creatively, and make the experience great.

Finished Steve Jobs in Exile. What a great book. I kept hearing the same story I'd read in Elon Musk's biography, about the first Tesla Roadster. The NeXT cube and the Roadster have a lot of parallels. Both went all in on a design vision they loved, in a money-is-no-object kind of way. Both got buyers and fans. Neither got the commercial success they were hoping for. But both person learned a lot from the experience, and both used it to build the extremely successful products that came after.

We just started with a second-time SF-based founder tackling a very ambitious problem. Our first call with his team turned into a conversation we hadn’t planned for. Here’s how we handled it. The founder came to us with a clear ask: help us tackle some of the design tasks that are on the roadmap. A backlog, a launch date, not enough hands. Simple enough. We got started and set up a call with the team. We figured this would be a meeting to get us set up. It quickly turned into a meeting about process. And honestly, that was on us. We made a mistake. We use AI to shrink timelines and come up with higher quality designs, and we’ve been working that way long enough that it’s just how we work now. We didn’t realize it was completely new to them. A team in a grind doesn’t have spare attention for a process it doesn’t understand, and they needed to see it and buy in before we touched anything on their roadmap. Luckily everyone had extra time, so we extended the call and got the questions on the table. Then we booked a follow-up for first thing the next morning and kept the conversation going in Slack in between, so people could digest it on their own time instead of in a meeting. I’d prepared a demo for that second call and started walking through it. I didn’t get to finish. Everyone was already aligned, the decision was made, and we were unblocked. Our team is now powering through the design tasks, and we’re almost fully caught up with everything that was overdue when we came in. Less than 24 hours from a call that went sideways to a team that was fully on board. Everything overdue is nearly cleared, and the launch date hasn’t moved.

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.