Dive Club (Deep Dives) �‪�‬ Ridd

Today we're talking with designer and entrepreneur, Hunter Hammonds, who has grown 5 different agencies to millions in revenue in less than a year. So in this episode we walk through the different stages of building an independent design business—starting from positioning yourself as a solopreneur all the way to scaling operations to 7 figures. We get into the weeds about:
- Hunter’s framework for selling yourself on a landing page
- The tactics OffMenu uses to convert more leads to customers
- Why Hunter thinks MRR is a misguided metric
- What operational fat you can trim to increase margins
- How you can improve your sales calls
- + a lot more
- Petr Knoll - https://twitter.com/iampetrknoll (design partner OffMenu)
- Christian O’Brian - https://www.linkedin.com/in/obrienchristian/ (CEO OffMenu)
- Sahil Bloom - https://twitter.com/SahilBloom (partner OffMenu)

- Agencies
- Instrument - https://www.instrument.com/
- Basic - https://www.basicagency.com/
- Ueno - https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/06/twitter-acquihires-creative-agency-ueno-to-help-design-new-products/
Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿
🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

Ready for a masterclass in positioning? Nick Pattison has been working for himself for well over 10 years... but recently he's laser-focused on running 1-week brand sprints (and it's working). So this episode is a deep dive into his new freelance playbook:
- The automations that allow him to focus on sales and creative direction
- Lessons learned from running 25+ brand sprints at $15k each
- How Nick focuses on growing his creative muscles
- His strategies for presenting work to clients
- Why he stopped writing proposals
- + a lot more…
- Nick’s agency: Primary Studio - https://primary.studio/
- Nick’s talent company: Stellar - https://www.stellar.work/
- Nick’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/thenickpattison
Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿
🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub

This episode is the ultimate design founder story. Dennis shares all of the ups and downs along his journey to build Amie—a new productivity tool that captures your emails, calendar, and to-dos in a single beautiful product. Some of the highlights:
- Where Dennis draws inspiration
- The traits Dennis looked for in early hires
- What Dennis looks for in design candidates
- The backstory behind Amie’s viral website launch
- How Dennis balances his intuition with product feedback
- How Dennis thinks about innovating vs. capitalizing on familiarity
- Things 3 app - https://culturedcode.com/things/
- Stefan - https://twitter.com/_animify the Amie design engineer
- Devin - https://www.cognition-labs.com/introducing-devin—AI coder
- Brian Chesky interview - https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach on Lenny’s Podcast
- The Amo app - https://amo.co/
- Dennis’s custom Amie pants - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEoOIsjW0AUYiTj?format=jpg&name=900x900
Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿
🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub
Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Over the last few months, design engineering has by far been the #1 most requested topic. So I wanted to get the inside scoop from the team at Vercel to learn more. In this episode we get to hear from:
1. Glenn Hitchcock - https://twitter.com/glennui (Director of design engineering)
2. John Pham - https://twitter.com/JohnPhamous (Lead design engineer)
The goal of this conversation is to help people understand the role that design engineers play and to outline a path you can take to develop some of these skills. We talk about:
- The strategy behind Vercel’s new website
- Why Vercel built a design engineering team
- How designers collaborate with design engineers
- What Vercel looks for when hiring design engineers
- How Vercel is always building with re-usability in mind
- + a lot more - Maggie Appleton’s quote on software creation from our group interview
- https://anthonyhobday.com/blog/20240122.html
- vercel.com/ship
- Framer components - https://drams.framer.website/ (inspired by Dieter Rams’ design principles)
- Screwball scramble - https://us.tomy.com/screwball-scramble/
- Dead Simple Sites - https://deadsimplesites.com/
Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿
🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub
Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

Since the beginning of my design career, I’ve looked up to Metalab. So this interview is a special one because we get to learn from their Head of Design, Michael Wandelmeier. We go deep into how design works at Metalab and talk about specific strategies around:
- Mike’s go-to storytelling tactics
- The importance of opinionated design
- When they ignore constraints on a project
- The unique way they map out user journeys
- Tips for driving alignment on complex projects
- How they use the “ridiculously early hypothesis”
Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿
🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub
Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪

One of the tools I'm most interested in right now is Relume. 200k+ people are using it to design and build websites faster with AI. They have a massive set of Figma/Webflow components which allows them to take a unique approach that “respects the process” of web design. In this bonus episode, their co-founder Adam gives us an end-to-end demo where he sitemaps, wireframes, designs, and builds a full website in ~30 min. We then get into the weeds about:
- How the web design process will evolve with AI
- What this means for the role of designer
- His journey as a design founder adapting to AI
- Where Relume is headed next as a company
👀 Dive is where the best designers never stop learning 🤿
- Relume’s Figma library - https://www.relume.io/figma-library
- Relume’s Webflow library - https://www.relume.io/components
- Galileo - https://www.usegalileo.ai/explore (another AI tool we mentioned)
🌐 dive.club 🐦 twitter.com/joindiveclub
Now you can join advanced courses taught by the top designers to help you take a huge leap forward in your career 💪