Our Manifesto

You’ve Been Lied
To About Product Development

A note from our founder

Dear Fellow SaaS Founder,

I know the exhilaration and exhaustion of turning a raw insight into a living product. I’ve felt the 2 a.m. adrenaline rush when a feature finally ships, and I’ve endured the 2 p.m. crash when dashboards reveal that users still do not care. Those swings teach you quickly that trust - the confidence your users, investors, and team place in you - is the lifeline that keeps a startup from capsizing.

Over the past decade at Designli I have watched a troubling pattern ossify into gospel: "Ship a fast and cheap MVP, learn, then iterate." It sounds reasonable, even virtuous, yet in practice it has become startup kryptonite. "Vibe coding" a prototype in a weekend rarely yields signal; it yields noise and a codebase your future self will resent. Offshore dev shops promise "quick yet high quality" like late-night infomercials selling six-pack abs in seven minutes. "Launch early, fix later" mortgages your credibility on technical debt you can never refinance.

Yes, if you just want to scratch an itch, grab a no-code tool and share the link with friends. But the moment you ask real users to entrust their workflows or data to you, you need more than vibes. You need a pixel-perfect Version 1 that you are proud to demo, investors respect, and discerning users love. That takes talented designers who obsess over every micro interaction, senior engineers who know which AI tools truly accelerate delivery without bloating your codebase, and a product team that ties every commit to a measurable business hypothesis.

At Designli, we call that team your Dedicated Product Team. It acts like a founding squad: full-time, cross-functional, and obsessed with your product's success. There is no split focus and no excuses - just results you can scale with and finally feel proud of. Full-time focus gives you faster clarity and fewer dropped handoffs. Multidisciplinary teams give you deeper product context and real ownership. Long-term assignment means trust compounds over time.

We work through Hypothesis-Driven Development, beginning each sprint with a falsifiable statement linking effort to an outcome both users and your metrics will feel. We build the smallest slice that can disprove that hypothesis, measure ruthlessly, and let the data decide. There is no velocity theater - just compounding learning.

Our engineers are AI empowered, never AI replaced. The right tools make seasoned professionals 15 to 30 percent more effective, and we pass that gain directly to you. Yet a copilot still cannot tell you why Danielle, your ideal customer persona, rage quits at onboarding screen three. Nor can it protect your architecture from silent scale killers hiding twelve months down the roadmap. That still takes humans at the top of their game - armed with AI, not replaced by it.

Our industry is littered with trauma stories: "The dev shop ghosted three weeks before launch." "The codebase was so brittle that no one could add a button without breaking Stripe." We are turning those scars into redemption arcs - detailed success stories and more than 200 public five-star reviews that show how our teams have rebuilt trust and shipped product. It’s proof, not pitch, that craftsmanship beats shortcuts every time.

Whether you are a startup dreamer seeking a pixel-perfect Version 1 or a founder recovering from a disaster, we exist to deliver peace of mind. We build new products for nontechnical founders who are nervous about entrusting their baby and rescue existing products from messy codebases, flaky freelancers, and unaccountable agencies. Designli is where nontechnical SaaS founders go when they want a product team they can truly trust, either from Day 1 or Day 201.

If you’re ready to trade founder PTSD for predictable progress, let us build the Version 1 your vision deserves. Our mission, delivering a 5-star product development experience for each client, gives non-technical founders the peace of mind and product traction they’ve earned.

With resolve,
Keith Shields
Co-founder and CEO, Designli

All Keith wanted for his 10th birthday was a domain name. Fast forward a few years to high school, and when his mom told him to get a summer job he opted to sell his website instead - rather than start mowing lawns.

While working on his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University, Keith spent his time coding websites and launching the Ohio State Freestyle Rap and Beatbox Club, which grew to be one of the largest student-run organizations on campus. Keith paired up with Josh to build a college startup, Applits, named Inc.com’s “Coolest College Startup of 2014,” and has been leading app and web-app projects with Designli ever since.

Josh is a natural contrarian, and often goes against the crowd when he thinks there’s a better way. A college athlete and engineering student turned college dropout, Josh wanted to pursue entrepreneurship rather than getting a degree. That’s when he teamed up with Keith and found his passion for the technical complexities of building and launching new software systems.

As an aspiring private pilot, scuba diver, and personal finance enthusiast, Josh is a “jack of multiple hobbies” and master of, well, some. As the COO of Designli, Josh enjoys learning how customers’ businesses work and figuring out how to design and implement software to solve their problems.

As Designli’s CTO, Nelson has been instrumental in shaping the company’s philosophy and processes. Before joining Designli, Nelson has held roles as a game developer, researcher, professor, and Chief Executive Officer. His background has endowed him with knowledge of finance, emerging technologies, and all things software development.

Most importantly, Nelson’s experience has connected him with a wide network of skilled people. He helps Designli draw from a talent pool that spans the entirety of the Americas. This helps us build a deep roster of the best app designers and developers available.