Design Critique as a Service

The Backstory

I've spent the last 5+ years designing SaaS products with first time SaaS founders, veterans who've exited for 150M+, and enterprises looking to incubate new ventures in house.

Along my journey, I've spent some time working with small, local design agencies, and Fjord, a 1300+ person global design consultancy under Accenture.

The Problem

What boggled my mind most are the massive fees a global consultancy or even a small local agency charges clients. They bill relatively junior consultants at $200/hr+. Add to that the work that an agency does often varies in impact.

There's parts of the design process that are high value for an expensive consultant, and parts you should be doing in-house or with an affordable freelancer. A $200/hr+ consultant shouldn't be spending hours designing your icons.

The Idea

What I realized is the most valuable service a consultancy like Fjord offers is their product thinking, design critiques, and creative brainstorming/workshops. They have an unmatched ability to offer outsider perspective and structure to your creative thinking, and leverage their experience in your industry to pull your venture forward.

I wanted to take the most valuable services a veteran in the industry can offer, and make them accessible to the budget conscious early stage founders I work with. You often don't need a veteran designer's full time attention to create quality products.

Instead, you should be using a hub and spoke model. Get a veteran designer to critique your SaaS product and give direction to an in-house or affordable freelancer to execute. This gives you the quality standards of an expensive designer, for the cost of an affordable designer.

So I separated out the design critique: A quick, affordable way for SaaS founders to get outsider perspective, ideas, and feedback on how to improve their SaaS product and landing page.

It's a productized subscription service. On a monthly or quarterly basis, you'll have a veteran SaaS designer work with your team to offer critique and direction that you can implement in-house.

Would love any feedback: settlers.co