Why you'll need systems design?

You're a founder of a startup or small business looking to improve your website's conversation rates, your app's user experience or your company's business processes.

I help founders by auditing their current system, creating a plan, design & build the solution. I look to help you cut costs while providing a high quality product. What will you expect while with me? Here's some lists to digest:

• Location: Remote; Slack for Communication.
• Scheduling: 4-12 weeks, plus one month of support.
• Deliverable: Discovery playbook, new website or app & one month of support.
• Qualification: Most effective for companies already making between $100,000 & $500,000 before profit, with a company size of 1-10 & majority of your sales are generated online.
• Price: $10,000+, depending on size of project.

Project Process

• Kickoff: We'll meet for the first time to establish communication channels, introduce team members & talk about why we're solving this problem.
• Discovery: We'll meet to understand your problem & your goals. We'll create a plan by performing design audits, user interviews, competitive analysis, feature priority graphs, user flows or lo-fi wireframes. This plan will also include goals, roadmap, milestones, team & budget.
• Design: We'll work to improve the user experience & system by designing hi-fi wireframes, prototypes, visual designs or design systems. Designs are created in Figma, where you'll be able to follow along in the process & leave feedback.
• Develop: We'll develop the design in the chosen tech stack to setup or improve the functionality of your product. This include setting up the environment; setting up back-end infrastructure; developing the front-end pages and components; and running test to squash those nasty bugs.
• Ship & Iterate: We'll ship the product by launching your website or pushing your product to the app store. Post launch, we'll review analytics, heatmaps & sessions to find out if we're hitting our metrics. Then we'll just loop back to the top of this list and solve the next problem.

Testimonials

• Organics Alive
  "It runs smoothly. We do about 250k with zero advertising!"
  - Todd Salemi, Founder & President of Organics Alive
• Novvum.io & ReactHeadless.com
  "If we’re doing an internal project, I measure success by checking whether or not I like their designs. If it’s for one of our end clients, I check whether or not the customer likes their outputs.
  
  So far, the quality of Made by Porter’s work is perfect. On top of that, our website — which they’ve helped develop — has a 70% conversion rate. "
  - Matt Zimmer, CEO of Novvum

Frequently Asked Questions

• How do I know we're a good fit?
  Here's some questions for you. Could we just clone one of my past projects for your project? Does the design style you see within my past projects work for you? Are you pulling in more than $100,000 year in revenue or have more than $100,000 in funding? Are most of your touchpoints online? If you answer yes to most of these questions, then we'll be a good fit!
• I already know what I want and just need you to just design.
  The service I offer are for Founders who need to pass on the design thinking responsibilities so the Founder can focus on business, marketing or engineering. If you're looking for a designer that can come in to work on an existing solution or plan, I can refer you to a freelance designer who can help you!
• I would like to see more visual work. Where can I find more visuals?
  If you're looking for more visuals for a specific project, let me know here. I can add more screens to a certain case study or show you screens within Figma on a video call!
• What happens on this call with you?
  We'll talk about your current problems with your app. Is your editing process cumbersome? Are customers complaining about user experience issues? These are the things we will talk about.
• How long is the average project?
  Most projects take about 1-3 months for websites and 3-6 months for apps.
• Can you work in our office?
  Most of the time I work with clients remote. If we're in the same city, I'll make exceptions to have very important meetings in person. If I need to travel far, then the client is responsible for travel fees, which will be included in the budget or expensed.
• How will we communicate during projects?
  Depends on your needs. I can communicate either through email, phone, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Slack, etc.

Why work with me?

I'm Chris Porter, a product designer & engineer. I've started learning to design & code 22 years ago, during the Web1 days when Geocities was king.

Obtained my first freelance clients 18 years ago, designing a website for a jewelry company and designing a website for my high school's Commercial Arts program. During my time in college 14 years ago, I worked at a Pittsburgh marketing agency designing websites for companies like General Electric, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Dick's Sporting Goods & Giant Eagle.

These days, I enjoy helping new & trending brands improve their digital systems, so that their customers have a smoother experience. Improving systems so the people that work at their brands can do their jobs quickly.

I've helped improve the systems for many upcoming & now established brands such as Organics Alive, Hyrecar, Novvum & Silicon Beach Talent. My mission in life is to make life simpler, while bringing down the costs to produce that simplicity.

Values

• Make Things SimpleSimple Things
• Make Things UsefulUseful Things
• Make Things ImpactfulImpactful Things