Why I run a one-person design and growth studio

People sometimes ask when I plan to hire a team. The honest answer is that I don't. I run a one-person studio on purpose, and after a few years of doing it this way I am more convinced, not less, that it is the right shape for the work I want to do.

This post explains why I work solo, how the subscription works, and who it is a good fit for. It is also a fair way to tell you who it is not for.

How I got here

I'm Shobrun Bagastio, a product designer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Before running my own studio I worked inside product teams: at Ruangguru, at Intellect (YC S21), and as the founding designer at Dearflow (Techstars '24). Those jobs taught me how much of a designer's time goes into things that are not design. Status meetings, handoff documents, waiting for approval, explaining the same decision to three different people.

When I started freelancing, I tried the usual model first: scope a project, write a proposal, send an invoice, start work, renegotiate when the scope changes. It worked, but it was slow. The founders I worked with did not have fixed projects. They had a running list of things they needed this week, and the list kept changing as they learned.

So I changed the model to match how startups actually work.

How the subscription works

The studio runs on one plan: Fullstack Design & Growth, for $2,200 a month.

• You can submit as many requests as you like. They go into a shared queue.
• I work on one request at a time, in the order you set.
• Most requests come back in about 24 hours. Larger ones are broken into pieces so you still see progress every day.
• You can pause or cancel whenever you want. There are no long contracts.

"Fullstack" means the requests can cover most of what an early product needs to look and sell like a real company: product UI and UX, landing pages and websites (often in Framer or Next.js), brand identity, pitch decks, marketing assets, and the growth side such as onboarding flows, conversion tweaks, and basic analytics setup.

A typical week might be a pricing page redesign on Monday, a set of App Store screenshots on Tuesday, and an onboarding flow on Wednesday and Thursday. You prioritise; I ship.

Why solo

Context does not get lost. When you talk to me, you are talking to the person doing the work. There is no account manager translating your feedback for a junior designer. I remember why we chose a certain layout two months ago, because I was the one who chose it with you.

Speed comes from fewer handoffs, not more people. A team of five can produce more pixels than I can. But most early-stage design work is not blocked on pixels. It is blocked on decisions. With one person, a decision is made as soon as I understand the problem, and the result shows up the next day.

The price stays honest. An agency with staff has to keep everyone busy, which pushes toward bigger scopes and longer timelines. I don't have that pressure. If your queue is empty, you can pause and stop paying. That aligns my incentives with yours: I want you to get value fast, because a subscription that doesn't deliver gets cancelled.

I stay close to building. I also build my own products, such as Monveo, an AI personal finance app. Running products of my own keeps my design work grounded in what actually moves numbers. It would be much harder to keep doing that while managing a team.

The trade-offs

Working with one person has limits, and I would rather say them up front.

• One request at a time. If you need ten screens designed in parallel by Friday, a single designer is the wrong choice.
• I am one human. I plan around holidays and tell clients early, but there is no backup designer.
• It is not a replacement for in-house design at scale. Once a company has several product squads, it usually needs its own design team. I am happy to help set that up, but it is a different job.

Who it fits

The subscription works best for:

• Early-stage founders who need design across product, website, and marketing, but not a full-time hire yet.
• Small product teams with engineers and no designer, who want someone who can work directly in their tools and ship with them.
• Founders who already have a designer and need extra capacity for brand, growth, or marketing work.
• Teams in different time zones. I work from GMT+7, which means requests sent at the end of a US or EU day are often ready by the next morning.

It is a weaker fit if you need a large one-off project with a fixed scope, a contract, and many stakeholders signing off at each stage. A traditional agency is built for that, and that is fine.

How to start

If you are not sure whether it fits, the simplest step is a short discovery call. We talk through what you are building, what is in your queue, and whether a subscription makes sense. If it doesn't, I will tell you.

I started this studio because I wanted a way of working that matched how startups really move: small, fast, and close to the product. So far, staying small has been the reason it works.