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 can lead design and roll up my sleeves — strategy, product, marketing, research, writing. I have experience taking ideas from whiteboard to working by collaborating with engineers, PMs, and founders.
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:
An articulated 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 perspectice — planning, analysis, and translation of insights into directions and prototypes you can act on
Design-culture and culture-of-critique mentorship for your team
A standing sounding board and whiteboard partner, with quick low-to-mid fidelity prototypes on fast follow-up
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.
How it works:
We start by defining the project and its goals as sharply as we can — so we both know exactly what success looks like
We execute that plan efficiently, without scope creep or wasted motion
If we learn something that requires changes to the plan, we adjust the plan
Case Studies
Numenor
Brand identity and marketing site for a B2B AI startup.
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
Strategic research and interaction design 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
Brand identity and marketing partner for an online farmer’s market.
And I do mean partner — Rootstock is my wife’s company. I worked closely with her 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
Pioneering mobile touch operating system from concept to launch.
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.