Founding Product Designer

Overview

Most AI app builders try to turn one prompt into an entire product.

That usually gives you something that looks finished and falls apart the moment you use it.

x1 takes a different approach.

We help someone move from a rough idea to a real iPhone app through a structured journey: understand the idea, plan the product, map the screens, shape the experience, build it, test it on a phone, and publish it to the App Store.

The hard part is not making screens look good.

It is deciding what the user needs to see next. What can wait. Where the primary action belongs. How much control to expose. How to make AI output feel trustworthy. How to get someone to a first real win before they leave.

We need a founding product designer who obsesses over those questions.

What you'll do

• Own the product experience across onboarding, planning, design, building, testing, subscriptions, and publishing.
• Turn complicated AI workflows into steps that feel obvious.
• Decide what belongs on a screen and what should not exist.
• Design for both sides of x1: the creation product and the iPhone apps our users are trying to ship.
• Work directly with the founder and engineers in a tight loop: understand → hypothesize → prototype → ship → measure → change.
• Own outcomes, not just screens. Define the metric, ship the smallest useful test, read the result, and run the next test.
• Use funnels, product data, recordings, user calls, and experiments to improve activation, completion, retention, and paid conversion.
• Build the patterns and design system that keep x1 coherent as the product grows.
• Get close to implementation. If you can prototype or ship UI in code, even better.

The upside

You will not be polishing someone else's finished roadmap.

The core product is still being defined. A decision you make this week can ship next week, show up in the data, and change whether people understand the product, finish an app, pay, or come back.

Your work also has unusual leverage: you are shaping x1 and, indirectly, the experience of the apps people create with x1.

If this works, you can grow from our first product designer into the person who owns design at x1, helps shape the roadmap, and eventually builds the team around you.

This is a chance to define a new category at the intersection of consumer software, AI, design tools, and app creation—with real ownership and meaningful equity.

Who you are

You notice why a button feels wrong before most people can explain it.

You can tell us why the CTA belongs there, what the user is worried about in that moment, which alternatives you rejected, and which behavior your choice should change.

You connect design decisions to measurable behavior. You define success before shipping, understand funnels and events, and test constantly instead of arguing from opinion.

You are comfortable being wrong. When the data disagrees with your design, you learn quickly and run the next experiment.

You have strong taste, but you do not confuse taste with personal preference.

You have personally worked on consumer apps and serious SaaS, creator, or productivity products.

You understand onboarding, activation, empty states, errors, paywalls, progressive disclosure, mobile constraints, and AI uncertainty.

You move fast. You show unfinished work. You want ownership.

This is not for

• Someone who waits for perfectly written tickets.
• A portfolio made mostly of pretty Dribbble screens.
• A designer who cannot explain what metric a change was meant to move.
• A designer whose work stops at Figma.
• Anyone sending generic or AI-generated application copy instead of showing us how they think.

We do not care much about pedigree or famous logos.

We care about the work, the reasoning behind it, and whether you can make x1 meaningfully better.

How to apply

Do not send a polished cover letter.

Show us two products you personally worked on: one consumer app and one SaaS, creator, or productivity product. Be precise about what you owned and what shipped.

Then walk us through one design decision and one experiment. What was the baseline? What did you believe would change? What options did you consider? Why did the final choice win? Which metric moved? If it did not work, what did you learn and test next?

A short Loom is strongly preferred. Raw and specific beats polished and generic.

Full-time. Remote worldwide. $2k–$5k per month, depending on experience and scope, plus meaningful equity.