What Gev Design is
Gev Design is a senior-led design and product partner for startup founders. We help founders solve the early problems that decide whether a product gets built and used — what to make first, how the core experience should work, what the brand says — and we ship it alongside the team. Product design and branding are the core; around them we handle MVP design, zero-to-one product design, prototyping, copywriting, and front-end development. One partner, across work that usually falls between four different vendors.
Who Gev works best with
Our clients are mostly pre-seed to Series A founders in AI/ML, fintech, crypto and Web3, and productivity and data platforms, with selective work in biotech, climate, and legal tech. The best fit is a founder at an inflection point who needs senior product and design judgment to shape a first version or fix early design debt — and who values moving fast with someone who acts like an owner. We work with a small number of companies at a time.
What makes the model different
Most agencies route you through account managers and junior handoffs and need a clean brief before they start. We work embedded and direct: senior people only, in your Slack, shipping weekly, giving feedback that improves the product and not just the pixels. It's closer to a co-founder relationship than a vendor one — what BetaKit described as a new model for design, and what founders who've been through the agency cycle usually just call a relief. If you're weighing the options, see how a fractional design partner compares to a full-time hire and an agency.
Founder background
Gev Design is led by Gev Marotz, a fractional design and product partner based in Toronto. Gev has spent a decade building products inside real organizations under real pressure — including work at Wealthsimple and six years running creative at a global agency — and the studio has delivered more than $2M of product, brand, and website work for founders and venture-backed companies. The throughline is practical judgment from having shipped before, not theory.
How Gev tends to work with teams
Engagements are embedded and weekly. We join your Slack, sit in on standups, and ship continuously rather than disappearing and returning with a reveal. We plug into your existing developers and product managers so the work lands in production, and we scale scope up or down as your needs change. Because there's no hiring process, engagements usually start within days.
What clients usually need help with
Founders typically come to us to shape a first product and get it built, to fix a prototype that's doing too much, to give engineers clear design direction, or to unify a product and brand before a raise or launch. The deeper background on how we think about this work lives in our guides and FAQ.
