Dalton Mills×
A product design sprint to take the Dalton Mills platform from thesis to designed, prototyped product. With a near-term strategy to get to market.
The ability to empower customers to generate what they need, to power the long tail of product experiences that were never economically viable before, opens up entirely new categories of software. Dalton Mills sits right at that intersection: a platform that lets operators build the vertical depth no centralized product team could ever justify. The 80/15/5 architecture, the inference-driven customization, the Blue Collar Builder marketplace. This is the kind of product that only exists because AI makes it possible.
What it needs now is the product experience that brings the thesis to life. The onboarding that configures itself through inference, so a plumbing company with 40 trucks gets a different setup than a two-person pest control operation. The builder layer that makes it intuitive for a flooring retailer to ship a sample-checkout plugin without rebuilding an entire CRM from scratch. The marketplace that surfaces trust, traction, and social proof across trades. And the design language that signals "this is how you run your business going forward" without ever feeling disconnected from the people using it.
We've designed platforms and tools in this world for years. We know how Shopify's ecosystem works because we've worked with Shopify. We understand SaaS integration points because we've designed for Intuit, Salesforce, and Slack. We've watched what happens when you give people the ability to generate and ship software themselves, the way Bolt.new has done for developers. That generative unlock is core to what Dalton Mills can offer its customers, and designing for it requires understanding both the builder experience and the platform economics underneath.
We're fired up about this opportunity.
Both options include product strategy, design, and prototyping. Option B also includes foundational brand work: a complete brand system, brand guidelines, and visual explorations that define how Dalton Mills looks and feels across every touchpoint.
We design a lot in code now, so the handoff from design to engineering is even more seamless, whether that's us building or someone else.
We take the Dalton Mills thesis and turn it into a designed, prototyped product: the platform rails, the inference-driven onboarding, the Blue Collar Builder plugin ecosystem, and the marketplace. Grounded in a near-term product strategy with tactical designs that are ready to build and take to market.
Because you already have a strong product strategy defined, we can move faster through discovery and invest more in design depth and prototype fidelity. We deliver a strategy deck, high-fidelity designs of core flows, interactive prototypes, and a foundational design system ready for engineering.
Click any phase to expand.
We immerse in the Dalton Mills thesis, the competitive landscape, and the specific trades you're targeting first. We define the near-term product strategy: what ships in V1, how the 80/15/5 architecture translates into a concrete product framework, and how the platform gets to market.
We run early design explorations across core flows: onboarding, the contractor daily experience, the builder ecosystem, and the marketplace. Light research into the trade personas and competitive positioning. Some future-state thinking for the platform vision, grounded in what's buildable now.
Informed by the strategy from Phase 1, we design the core product experience in high fidelity. The contractor's daily workflow: CRM, quoting, scheduling, dispatch, invoicing, field tools. The inference-driven onboarding: "describe your business and the system configures itself." The Blue Collar Builder experience: how an operator goes from idea to published plugin. And the marketplace: discovery, trust signals, installation.
We bring these to life through designed screens and animated vignettes that make the product tangible and easy to evaluate. These are what you'll use to align with investors, partners, and your future engineering team.
We refine and polish all designs and prototypes based on feedback. The focus is on nailing the core flows and designs for what you go to market with: the MVP product. Everything gets tightened, detailed, and prepared for engineering handoff.
We deliver the foundational design system: components, tokens, patterns, and engineering-ready specifications.
Startup speed. Enterprise impact.
Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions. You can always find me on WhatsApp or iMessage as well.