01 — Build
v1 in 30 days. ↗
Strategy, design, ship. Marketing site, web app, or AI product — one operator, one focused sprint, working software in your hands inside a month.
For founders, indie operators, side-projects with teeth
Senior design. Senior code. AI-native delivery. Twenty-five years getting it done — as a team of one, or leading a team. Same shipping velocity. Studio output at the cost of a senior hire.
No retainers, no SOWs that take six weeks to sign. Pick the shape that fits your problem. We start fast.
Strategy, design, ship. Marketing site, web app, or AI product — one operator, one focused sprint, working software in your hands inside a month.
I plug into your team — Slack, Linear, Figma, GitHub — as the senior who can move design, code, and AI work forward at the same time. Weeks or quarters, not years.
Chat, agents, RAG, custom workflows, integrations. Not demos — shipped features your users actually press. I’ve been building with Claude, GPT and friends since the demo era ended.
A focused day (or three) to map where AI moves the needle for your product, team, or pipeline — and where it’ll waste your money. Includes a written roadmap you can ship from.
Sites rot. Frameworks update. Security patches drop. Content goes stale. Care & Feed keeps the lights on, the patches current, and the small things — new pages, copy edits, integration tweaks — flowing without a new SOW. Monthly retainer, senior hands, no ticket queues. The senior on speed dial when something breaks.
No account managers. No layers. You hire me, you get me — at the keyboard, in the Figma file, in the codebase. The same person who scopes it ships it.
I have rebuilt my stack around Claude, Codex, Cursor and a handful of agentic tools I trust. The output is faster, sharper, more iterated. The taste is still mine.
Most teams hand designs to engineers and lose 40% in translation. When the designer is the engineer, the spec is the code. The interface is the architecture.
Decks, mood boards, audits — fine. But the work is software that runs in production. Everything else is theater. I’ll send screenshots from staging instead.
From an NBA hall-of-famer’s personal brand to court systems used daily by thousands of Floridians. Range matters. Taste shows.
Designer, engineer, founder. Dad, guitar hacker, soccer-watcher. The guy who got fired from his first web job in 2001 for “not fitting in,” and turned that into a career.
The first website I ever shipped was for somebody else’s boss, out of his house, in 2001 — me and five other people crammed around a kitchen table. They let me go a few months later for “not fitting in.” I started Rise the next week. That was twenty-five years ago.
What I do has changed three or four times since. Drupal sites. iOS apps. Brand systems. Booking flows for tattoo shops. Court interfaces. Magazines. Internal tools nobody sees but everybody depends on. The constant is taste, range, and a habit of finishing.
What I do now is the most fun I’ve had in years.
“AI didn’t replace designers. It separated the senior ones from everyone else.”
A senior designer who also writes production code is already a rare animal. Plug a serious AI stack into that brain and the leverage gets absurd. Iterations that used to take a week happen in an afternoon. Specs become code. Code becomes a working build. A team of one moves like a studio of six.
I take on a small number of engagements at a time. Some are founder builds where I’m design, eng, and product. Some are agency drop-ins where I’m the senior they can’t quite afford to hire. Some are AI features inside existing products. All of them ship.
When I’m not at the keyboard I’m playing guitar (badly, with conviction), watching Tottenham lose in inventive new ways, or building Lego with my kids.
Send a paragraph about what you’re building, where you’re stuck, or what you wish existed. I read everything. If we’re a fit I’ll write back within two business days with a shape and a price.
Prefer email? stephan@rise.net