Traffic comes in. Sales don’t. The product isn’t the problem.
DesignDevelopmentHosting
People decide
People decide
in milliseconds.
I design for that.
Revenue 3-4x.
Same product. Different perception.
Nobody is thinking
about your website.
Your visitors are filtering and deciding before conscious thought kicks in.
50 milliseconds. That’s all the brain needs to form a judgment (Lindgaard et al., 2006). Gut reactions they can’t explain are deciding whether they stay or leave.
I built a methodology around that gap. Five layers between a visitor and a conversion. Miss one and the rest don’t matter.
Cognitive Load
×
First Impression
×
Trust
×
Behavior
×
Action
=
Decision
Read how it works →
Results
The receipts.
Revenue 3x
Simply Smart Home
Simply Smart Home made digital photo frames. Good product, steady sales. But “digital photo frame” sounds like a gadget from 2009.
I repositioned them as smart home décor. New brand system, new packaging, new web presence. The whole surface area. Same hardware inside.
Revenue tripled within the year. The partnership lasted four years. Disney licensed the brand.
“Stefan designed the brand, the packaging, and the product. Everything people see.”Simply Smart Home
Revenue 4x
Vacuum Sealers Unlimited. Ten years, same site. Incremental optimization, no redesign.
“The website Stefan built me helped put my 3 boys through college.”Owner, Vacuum Sealers Unlimited
50% → 75%
Online ticket sales at iO Theater. The Chicago improv institution that launched Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, and Amy Poehler.
“Stefan made our site in half the time, and even better looking than the agency we hired before him.”Managing Director, iO Theater
Retail & licensing
Origin
I figured this out
in a nightclub.
~300 people on a busy night in Santa Barbara. Same last call song, house lights slam on, and I’m barking at people to leave. A sour note saying “get out” on an otherwise good time. Always felt off to me.
So I started walking tables at 1:10. “Hey, last call’s coming up. Good time to grab any drinks you want. Thanks for coming out tonight.” No urgency. Just information, a suggestion, and a thank you.
By 1:30, people were saying goodnight and heading for the door on their own. Happier than the old way ever got them. Bar sales went up in those last 20 minutes, and we closed 30 minutes earlier than usual.
Right information, right time, right tone, and people cooperated on their own. A psychology degree from UCSB gave me the language. Fifteen years and hundreds of websites gave me the laboratory. That pattern became Perception-First Design™.
What I build
Spatial AI workflow canvas. Figma for the LLM era.
4 provisional patents. Open source under AGPL-3.0 + Defensive Patent Pledge. Built for what comes after Claude Design.
Automated design thinking. Evaluate and generate with “will this make sense?” logic.
5-layer methodology. ~100 peer-reviewed citations. Open-source Claude Code skill + corpus-driven evals engine.
A 12-chapter book on Perception-First Design.
Free PDF + EPUB. Counterpoint to Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.
Services
I ship in weeks what agencies
I ship in weeks what agencies
quote in months.
Design, development, and hosting. One person, no overhead. You pay for the work, not the org chart.
Growth Infrastructure
from $300/mo
Your site becomes my job.
And I pick up the phone.
Enterprise-grade hosting, sub-second load times, and security that’s always on. When something needs attention, I handle it before you notice.
- Site stays up. Stack-agnostic hosting, monitoring, daily backups.
- Site stays fast. Caching, CDN, image compression, edge tuning.
- Site stays safe. Security monitoring, SSL, DDoS protection, vetted updates.
- I see it first. Same-day response. Same person every time.
Month-to-month after first year. Included with all site builds.
Strategic Partnership
from $1,200/mo
Your revenue is the scoreboard.
I move the numbers.
Everything in Growth, fully covered. Plus the design and development capacity that compounds conversion.
- Your perception sharpens monthly. Methodology applied to brand, pages, conversion paths.
- Your stack evolves with you. New pages, components, A/B tests.
- Your brand scales without drift. Identity refinement, landing page design.
- I talk strategy, not tickets. Quarterly perception audit and roadmap.
Month-to-month. 30-day notice.
Not sure which tier? Don’t worry about it. See full service details →