Who this is for
We work with startup founders and early-stage teams who are choosing between hiring in-house, using a big agency, or bringing in a fractional partner. That usually means:
- Pre-seed and seed founders shaping a first product and brand.
- Teams post-MVP fixing early design debt and finding product-market fit.
- Technical founders who need senior product and UX judgment next to their engineers, not a full design hire yet.
If you have 35–40+ hours a week of steady design work and are scaling past product-market fit, you likely need a full-time hire. Here is how to tell the difference.
How engagements usually work
Engagements are embedded and weekly, not big-bang deliverables. We join your Slack, attend standups, ship continuously, and work directly with your developers and PMs so the work lands in production — not just in Figma. Because there is no hiring process, most engagements start within days, and scope scales up or down by the week as your needs change.
Why founders choose fractional over a big agency
Agencies route you through account managers and junior handoffs and need a tightly scoped brief before they start. Early-stage work is rarely that clean. A fractional partner gives you senior people doing the actual work, the speed to move with a changing product, and the accountability to change direction without a change order. For most early-stage teams that structure beats both a large agency and a premature full-time hire.
More on the trade-offs: why startups leave traditional design agencies and a big agency vs a fractional partner.
