Shader

Before there's a brand. Before there's a product. There's you👩‍🎨 Putting together a small crew of designers to collaborate with this summer. People who love 0→1 and want to work close with early-stage founders. ~ Product Design ~ Design Engineering ~ Brand / Graphic ~ Motion First brand, first prototypes, launch videos. Deep in it with founders, moving fast, having fun. Remote or in SF with me. Portfolios: DM or chatwithdasha@gmail.com

Everyone expects product designers to vibe-code their portfolios now. But here's the thing ~ it doesn't matter if you build it with code or craft. Every product and design person struggles with their portfolio website. Period. I know sooo many people doing phenomenal work every day who've never organized it into a proper site. We all have the Figma links, the decks, the case studies scattered everywhere ~ but sitting down to reflect on who you are and how you want to present it to the world? That's the real challenge. And I've tried everything — Claude Code, website builders, fully custom. The hard part is never the tool. It's the thinking. What do you want to show? What story are you telling? dashaanderson.com/ Here's mine story. Built with @readymag (huge thank you to Varvara Godovikova for her her inspiration), @claudeai Code, and a lot of love for @figma. It's wild to realize I've been working in product and design for 14 years now. From marketplaces and commerce in Europe (@Adevinta , @WANNABY6 ) to entertainment and AI at @Snapchat, to my founder journey at @shaderapp. P.S. If you're a hiring manager or founder looking for product and design help ~ reach out! I'm talking with a lot of great people this month as I figure out my next chapter.

Time to share what we’ve been cooking up these past couple of months with @SebastianThrun and our amazing team, working on AI personalization. Meet @shopongold — self-driving shopping haha ✨ Early access app is already here: apps.apple.com/us/app/gold-t…

Every day, you’ll get a special push notification when our shopping game begins. You’ve got just 1 hour to explore personalized deals, hand-picked for you by our AI. It’s magic: play, swipe, buy ~ apps.apple.com/us/app/gold-t… We’re super excited — after testing with early customers and seeing more purchases every day, we can finally invite more of our friends to join @shopongold 🎉 Have fun, and see you at 6pm PT.

This is probably the hardest post I’ve ever had to write. Shader has been my heart and soul for the past 2.5 years. We built both iOS and web versions, brought in nearly 100,000 creators, and had some truly amazing collaborations. Unfortunately, we can’t continue working on Shader full-time. I’ll do my best to keep the servers running for a few more weeks. Writing those words feels surreal. This journey has been life-changing in ways I didn’t expect. I risked everything — nearly all my savings — because I believed so deeply in this vision. We bootstrapped for six months, raised funding, and went full-time. We kept pushing, launching multiple versions, improving, and iterating. But one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is how quickly momentum can slip away when critical decisions aren’t made fast enough. Building a strong core team is key. I’ve spoken with other founders and investors, and one thing sticks with me: the real heartbreak isn’t in failing. It’s spending years making just enough progress to survive without ever fully reaching the dreams you set out to achieve — especially if you've already raised venture funding. I felt that deeply in the last stretch of this journey. But there’s so much I’m proud of. Shader wasn’t just a product; it became a part of people’s creative lives. I still hear from people in San Francisco who remember the quality of what we built, the cool design, and how ahead of its time Shader was in real-time creation. That means the world to me. I believe in Shader’s mission more than ever. I know it can live on through others, especially as AI continues to shape creative tools. For now, I plan to collaborate with other founders and learn from this experience. I can’t wait to build new and exciting products together! One day, I hope to get another chance to create something truly special as a founder. Until then, I just want to say thank you — to every person who believed in me, used Shader, shared their ideas and feedback, and supported us through all the highs and lows.

Real-time is the time 🥳Does anyone in my network know folks from this team who are working on real-time at @OpenAI? We (@shaderapp and I) need to chat!

4) Prepare for User Testing ~ - Create about 20 prototypes styled like App Store pages (scrollable in Figma). - Each prototype should display 10 app icons: five from competitors and five of your designs.

2) Design 15+ Variations of Your App Icon ~ - Focus on making your designs stand out. - Use contrasting colors (e.g., if most competitors use black, try white; if they use blue, try yellow). - Experiment with unique text styles, layouts, and graphic elements.

Here’s a growth life hack that took us from 5 search downloads 🙄 a day to over 700 in just a few weeks 🔥 This is a real case from summer 2024. How can you do this as a founder with a small team? Here's the process we followed:

End of summer... or the start of the busiest 👩‍💻 days in San Francisco! Had a fun at pitch night at the Immigrant Founders event at Microsoft yesterday 🚀 Link with our new product updates ~ shaderapp.com/get-started

okay, if we're all here building 'her' she should definitely know how to FaceTime you at any moment 🍓 ~ @shaderapp ~ playground.shader-web.com

Thank you, @ProductHunt community, for inviting @shaderapp to share our new demo tonight! I can’t believe that 6 years ago we won the Golden Kitty Awards with my previous startup… and I’m still building, and now it’s Shader 💛