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🤿 fractional future

🤿 fractional future

Gabe Valdivia's design co-founder as a service

Ridd
August 29, 2025

I think we're entering a world where the market for fractional design is about to explode…

So this week's episode is with one of my favorite people in the industry, Gabe Valdivia.

We're going to explore his independent journey → how he made the jump, how he's evolved the practice in year two, and all of the lessons he's learned along the way.

Some highlights:

Gabe’s three-phase client model
How to sell a client on fractional design
Gabe’s rules of thumb for pricing himself
How Gabe’s new apprenticeship program works
How Gabe vibe-coded his personal Freelance OS
How he has redefined success from year 1 to year 2
Gabe’s journey to figure out how to position himself as an independent
+ a lot more

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

🤝 WITH FRAMER

Framer just had a banger of a release called On Page Editing.

It allows anyone to update the site content directly on the live page…

No need to dive into the canvas or go through the designer every time someone wants to make a change 🤯

They just click the edit button and they can make changes to both CMS content and static layers like headlines and images.

It’s going to seriously speed up workflows. And it’s just another reason why Framer is my go to for building websites.

Click the link to get started 👇

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY

Why the market for fractional design is about to explode

The Macro Shift

We’re still early, but it’s not hard to see where this is going…

AI is making designers more efficient and more capable of owning larger parts of the product experience.

Pietro Schirano even imagines a future where design architects “employ” multiple agents to work on their behalf

How much impact can a single designer have on a product in that world?

Combine that with cheaper software and easier maintenance, and you get an explosion of new projects as Gabe Valdivia put it:

“There is a very likelihood that AI will create an explosion in new ideas and 0→1 projects while also providing a very viable solution to maintain those projects.”

Gabe Valdivia

So there are a few trends that I see converging:

More impact per designer
More new products needing design
More demand for design as a differentiating factor

And this is all paving the way for the rise of fractional design 👇

How fractional design differs from freelancing

How is fractional design different from traditional freelancing? There’s overlap for sure, but here’s the axis that I find different:

Freelancers take on fixed project scopes (which requires leadership to define the exact deliverables)

Fractional designers bring expertise, figure out what’s needed along the way, and often stick around longer while integrating more deeply with the team

That structure frees fractional designers to focus only on what they do best.

For Gabe, that’s 0→1 work. He loves the process more than the end artifact. Nothing is more life-giving than solving ambiguous problems on a whiteboard before anything is set in stone. So he’s built a business entirely around that stage:

“what if I made a company that was focused only on that on that phase? And that turned into what I'm doing now, which is working specifically for other startups in that phase and helping them get unstuck”

Gabe Valdivia

But there are other models too! Recently I spoke with someone who left Stripe to become a fractional design leader, helping later-stage companies set up their design orgs.

You also might remember Dan Winer’s comment about how he sees an opportunity to position fractional design system work specifically to help orgs get more out of Cursor:

“If I wasn't in the role I'm in, the thing that I would be doing is setting up a consultancy to be a design engineer to make Cursor and designers talk the same language. I think that a lot of companies would hire the person to set that up but might not be totally invested in having that person as a full time role”

Dan Winer

The point is that fractional design creates space to focus on the slice of the craft that feels most life-giving, while still making a big impact in a small amount of time.

How Gabe positions his independent business

I asked Gabe to role play a bit and sell himself to me in the interview so we could learn from some of the language he uses. Here’s his pitch in a nutshell.

Hiring full-time is hard and the best people are making $1M at Meta
Agencies have rigid processes and are even more costly
Freelancers require you to have everything figured out up front

“The option that I provide is I come in and it doesn't matter that you don't know what you need. We figure it out together. So we partner strategically on what the end result should be and you can think of me as a design co-founder as a service where I don't take co-founder equity.”

Gabe Valdivia

I love “design cofounder as a service” 😍

If you’re interested in the independent journey (or just like hearing the story of one of my favorite designers) then there is a lot more in the full episode 👇