I’m Matthew Beebe. Strategic design partner to ambitious founders.
Sounding board, sparring partner, and sharp critic. I push back on a direction when warranted, then double down when a call is made.
I distill a direction to its essence and generate alternatives fast — so we learn from artifacts instead of arguments.
I lead design and do the work: strategy, product, marketing, research, writing. Whiteboard to working, alongside your engineers and PMs.
You know you have problems with product.
You’re not sure what to do about them.
Ways To Work Together
Brand-In-A-Box
Everything you need to look and sound like a real company — positioning through launch.
Who it’s for: You're pre-launch or rebranding and need a coherent brand, quickly.
What you get:
Brand positioning statement
Visual identity
A V1 marketing webpage
A brand assets page
Fractional Design Partner
A senior design leader in the room, without the full-time hire.
Who it’s for: You're making product and design calls constantly but don't have a senior design lead to pressure-test them with.
What you get:
Strategic perspective, planning, analysis, and insight
Design-culture mentorship for your team
A standing sounding board, whiteboard partner, and fast prototypes
Project Based Designer
A defined design problem, scoped tightly and executed efficiently.
Who it’s for: You have a specific thing to design or build, with a clear beginning and end.
What you get:
A well defined problem and clear success criteria
Efficient execution, no surprises
A plan that flexes as we learn
“We thought we knew what we wanted to build. Matt led a process that showed us something much better. He helped us move faster and feel confident we were building the right product from the start.”
Case Studies
Numenor
Brand identity and marketing site for a B2B AI startup — brief to launch in two months.
Numenor’s product manages engineering changes for companies that build complex, physical things — cars, machines, hardware. I came up to speed quickly on the domain, then ran a tight process that channeled their own language into a brand: engineering redline markup reimagined as a dynamic visual system. Two months from brief to ship, brand guidelines handoff included.
hiku
Drove six-month retention from 39% to 62% for a connected kitchen device.
hiku helped busy families build a shared grocery list by scanning barcodes and recognizing voice — but a subscription model lives or dies on retention. I paired behavioral data with in-kitchen research to find the unglamorous, decisive friction (a dead battery, a skipped app download) and designed it out. Over two years, six-month retention climbed from 39% to 62%.
Rootstock
Named, branded, and launched an online farmer's market — and ran design through its first year.
I worked closely with the founder (my wife) to launch and operate its first year. Sometimes a founder knows exactly what they want. Other times they need something to react to—or just someone to get it done. I played all three roles: crystallizing the ideas already in her head, leading where her instincts were less defined, and handling every design asset from naming to Shopify to the newsletter. Turning what was in her head into something she could see, react to, and ship — alongside a remote ops and engineering team.
WebOS
Helped define mobile touch design from scratch on a platform that shaped what came after.
A founder building something genuinely new needs a designer who can establish new patterns, not only apply existing ones. Palm's webOS was a pioneering touch platform, built before the conventions of mobile design were settled. As Senior Interaction Designer I led design across Calendar, Memos, Tasks, Music, Camera, Videos, and Photos, working from first principles and shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers the whole way. That design-and-engineering integration is something I still bring to startup work — and the platform went on to influence the mobile design that followed.
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