Embedded design partner, not a vendor.

The agency model is broken.

Most design agencies operate the same way: a senior partner sells the project, a junior designer executes it, and the client pays premium prices for mid-level work.

The person in the pitch meeting is never the person in the Figma file. The handoff happens silently. By the time founders realize the gap, they're weeks in and committed.

This model exists because agencies need to scale revenue. More clients means more juniors. More juniors means less quality control. Eventually the founders who got burned swear off agencies entirely.

The alternative isn't obvious. Most designers who leave agencies try to build their own — and repeat the same cycle. Hire to grow. Grow to hire. Eventually you're not designing anymore. You're managing people who are designing.

Not a vendor. Not an agency. A design partner.

Otherplace exists because founders deserve better than the agency bait-and-switch. Instead of layers, handoffs, and account managers — you get direct access to a senior practitioner who sits in the room, understands the product deeply, and builds the systems that hold everything together as the company grows.

This isn't outsourcing. It's embedding. Otherplace operates as your design function — shaping brand identity, product experience, and visual systems from the inside out. The context compounds over time, and that compounding is the product.

This only works with constraints. Otherplace takes on 2-3 partnerships per year — not because demand is low, but because concentrated attention produces better work than distributed teams. Deep context beats shallow coverage every time.

When you partner with Otherplace, you're not buying hours. You're buying judgment, taste, and twelve years of pattern recognition that only comes from being in the room when it matters.

Built from the inside out.

Otherplace is led by Andres Jasso — a designer who spent over a decade embedded with startups before going independent.

First design hire and Head of Design at Wisely, a customer intelligence platform where he shaped everything from the product UI to the brand identity over six years. Wisely raised $50M+ and was acquired by Olo for $187M in 2021. Before that, part of the product design team at Couple, later acquired by Life360.

That experience shaped everything about how Otherplace operates. Startups don't need vendors who disappear after the handoff. They need partners who understand the pressure of runway, the weight of investor expectations, and the reality of building with limited resources.

Recent work includes AtlasGrid, a YC Fall 2025 company building AI-powered analytics infrastructure. Otherplace developed their complete brand identity, visual system, and website — helping position the company to raise $5M through Y Combinator.

The studio's portfolio spans SaaS, fintech, logistics, analytics, media, and hospitality — with work contributing to over $200M in business outcomes.

AI-augmented, not AI-replaced.

The question that comes up most: "How does an embedded partner move faster than a full agency team?"

The tools changed. Not incrementally — fundamentally.

AI handles what used to require a production team. Iteration that took days now takes hours. Exploration that was cost-prohibitive is now standard. The bottleneck shifted from execution to direction.

This doesn't replace the designer. It amplifies the designer. Twelve years of accumulated judgment, augmented by tools that remove friction — that combination delivers more than a team of ten where the senior person isn't touching the work.

The stack includes AI for research synthesis, copywriting drafts, code generation, asset production, and rapid prototyping. Strategic decisions, creative direction, and craft refinement stay human. That's the part that can't be automated.

Full stack means full stack.

Most designers specialize. Brand or product. Static or interactive. Strategy or execution. Otherplace covers the full surface area because startups need coherence, not handoffs between specialists.

The through-line is coherence. When your design partner holds the whole picture — brand, product, website, content, motion, AI tooling — nothing gets lost in translation between specialists. And when new tools emerge, they get integrated immediately. The stack is always current.

This isn't for everyone.

Otherplace works best for founders between pre-seed and Series A. Early enough that design decisions compound. Late enough that there's real work to do.

Funded founders who need to move fast and want senior execution without agency overhead.

Bootstrapped founders who want to stay lean and prefer flexible structures — trading equity for lower cash when it makes sense for both sides.

If you're building something worth caring about and need a design partner who's been through the 0→1 journey multiple times — the calculator lets you model exactly what that partnership looks like. Adjust cash, equity, timeline. See the math before we ever talk. No hidden pricing. No "it depends."

Not every founder is the right fit. Not every deal makes sense. But when alignment is there, the work speaks for itself.