I’m Dorian Tireli. 15+ years designing products inside fast-moving startups — not consulting from the outside. One designer. Full accountability. No account managers. No juniors. No design theater.
Who I Am
Not an agency. Not a freelancer. Something sharper.
Poplab is me, Dorian — a product designer who has spent 15+ years embedded in SaaS companies, AI products, and early-stage startups across Europe. I don’t manage juniors or run accounts. I work directly with founders on the stuff that moves numbers: activation, conversion, retention, and time-to-first-value.
I’ve helped pre-seed founders turn vibe-coded MVPs into investor-ready products in 5 days. I’ve helped Series A teams compress feature design cycles from 8 weeks to 5 days. And I’ve helped post-seed founders stop losing users they didn’t even know were churning — because nobody had run the audit.
I don’t sell hours, decks, or vibes. I sell validated output tied to metrics your board will recognize — often starting with a free audit that shows you exactly what’s broken.
Why founders choose this over a traditional agency
- You talk directly to the person doing the work. No account managers. No junior handoffs. No context lost in translation between sales and delivery.
- Every decision is tied to a metric. Activation. Retention. Conversion. Time-to-value. If a design choice doesn’t move one of those numbers, it doesn’t ship.
- Startup speed, not agency pace. Days or weeks, not months or quarters. We fix what’s broken now — not what might be broken in six months.
- Honest feedback before you commit resources. If your flow has a UX problem, I’ll tell you before engineering builds it — not after.
- AI-accelerated, not AI-reliant. I use AI to compress research, iteration, and prototyping. But the judgment — the decisions about what to build and why — is entirely human.
One lead. Elastic capacity. No bloat.
You might wonder if one person is enough for your roadmap. Fair question.
I’m your strategic lead and primary designer on every engagement, start to finish. When a project needs more hands — dev, copy, brand, motion — I pull in a trusted network of specialists I’ve worked with before. No onboarding drag. No quality roulette. No team you’re paying to manage.
You get single-owner accountability with the flexibility to scale. Nothing bloated. Nothing brittle. Just the right people for the right problem, assembled fast.
This is a good fit if…
- You built an MVP with Lovable, Bolt, v0, or Cursor, it works, but it doesn’t look like what you’re asking investors to believe — and you have a raise or demo in the next 30 days.
- You have a live product with real users, but your activation or retention numbers make you cringe — and you need to find the leak before the board asks.
- You’re shipping fast with no in-house design lead, the backlog is piling up, and you need someone in the loop — not someone you brief every two weeks and hope for the best.
- You value speed, directness, and honest feedback over endless options and design theater.
- You want a partner who understands burn rate, product-market fit, and why your onboarding flow is costing you users — not just someone who makes things pretty.
This is not a fit if you’re looking for a large team, unlimited revisions, someone who’ll tell you your idea is great without checking the data first, or a vendor you can manage at arm’s length.
Let’s talk about your product.
20 minutes. Free. No pitch deck. Just a direct conversation about where you’re stuck and whether Poplab is the right fit.