We Moved in With My Mother-in-Law So I Could Build a Better World for Designers
About a year ago, I was living the life I thought I’d worked for. I had a thriving design practice with a few incredible employees, a brand new studio space that took two years to design and felt like a second home (those who know me described it as the physical manifestation of my brain), and I was working on projects for brands like Nike and Formula 1. The kinds of brands I used to dream about when I was a kid.
We bought a beautiful four-story townhouse in Philly. A couple minutes’ walk to all my favorite restaurants and bars. The kind of spot where you throw dinner parties and late-night hangs on the roof and just feel like you’re doing things right.
But while everything looked right on paper, I couldn’t shake this bigger idea. I kept thinking about how broken the creative process is for designers. How much time gets wasted on operational tasks. On naming conventions. On mockups. On chasing vague feedback and redoing slides and reformatting images. All of it.
I started imagining a world where that didn’t exist. Where designers actually had time to just design. And eventually that dream started to matter more than everything else.
So I made the hardest call I’ve ever made.
I shut the whole thing down.
I ended client relationships I worked years to build. I let go of a team that I loved. I closed the doors to our beautiful new studio. I walked away from the safety of a stable business and the comfort of the life I had built. All for a shot at something that could have an industry impact way larger than our studio work.
Now I’m writing this from the basement of my fiancé’s childhood home. It’s filled with boxes and baby stuff and storage bins. Me, my fiancé, and our 10-month-old moved in together with her mom so we could put everything we’ve got into building this dream.
We rented out our home. We stripped life back to the essentials. We’re all in.
And I mean all in. Every dollar we’ve raised is going toward building this product. No cushy founder salaries. No flashy perks. Just code, design, research, and the dream. That means more resources for better tools. Faster development. More value for both designers who will use what we’re building very soon (I appreciate all of your patience!).
I’m not doing this for headlines or some startup hype cycle (I actually hate a lot of this tech founder stuff). I’m doing this because I know what it feels like to be a designer just trying to do good work and compete on creativity without getting held back.
I truly believe we can change that.
So yeah. Right now, life looks a little different. We gave up comfort for clarity.
But I wouldn’t trade it. Because what we’re building is bigger than comfort. It’s something that could change how creative work gets done for good.
Thanks for being here. More soon.
Thanks,
Rahmi Halaby