Get a design and UX mentor who has shipped real products
Vetted GrowthMentor mentors who help founders, designers, and agencies make better product decisions. Every mentor below wrote their own take on the work.
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Rob Turlinckx
5.0 · +59 more
Blaine
Founder · Permit Hound
"I don't want to walk through an uncleared minefield without someone who has walked it before."
Hamel Shah
Co-Founder · CarrotsAndCake
"GrowthMentor enables us to swiftly get a world-class expert to give us guidance on any marketing issue or…"
Lena Sesardic
Product Manager
"Knowing I can always book a call to help me clarify what I'm doing is the best feeling in the world."
Minh
Solo Founder · SEOmatic
"I like to set my own strategies and then get help from experts to improve on them and check if I'm on the…"
Nicola Rubino
Growth Marketing Consultant · nicorubino
"It gave me fast access to expert-level insights that I couldn't get from academic research or user surveys…"
Annie Chen
Head of Marketing · DOWN Dating App
"Sometimes I'm stuck at one step and all I need is someone who can share experiences of what they did when…"
Carlos Terol
Co-Founder · Bagmaya
"I enjoy having pretty much instant access to a pool of worldwide, expert mentors who are keen to share their…"
Luka Karsten Breitig
Co-Founder · The Happy Beavers
"Imagine a world where everything you read was written by a subject-matter expert."
Flora Bui
Co-Founder · Acie
"My favorite thing about GrowthMentor is how it allows me to expand my network globally in a very short time…"
Maria Ledentsova
Digital Marketing Manager · magier
"Whatever problem I have, there's a friendly and incredibly helpful mentor ready to help."
Kate Bojkov
Head of Growth · EmbedSocial
"How quick and easy I can find somebody who had my problem and is willing to talk with me and openly share…"
Supriya Agarwal
Co-founder · BiosectRx
"Being able to connect with any expert across the globe at the click of a button. No network or previous…"
Anastasia Rubleva
Head of Growth · Rapid Dev
"I love the ability to receive valuable feedback from mentors who have been in the industry for decades."
Andrew McBurney
CEO & Co-founder · Review Robin
"You should cut out 99% of the things that you're thinking about."
The mentors, in their own words.
60 mentors available
Rob Turlinckx
Product Design (UX/UI) ▪️ Product Strategy ▪️ Marketing websites for B2B SaaS
Over a decade of hands-on experience designing and implementing B2B SaaS products, marketing sites, and user onboarding flows. Product Design • Onboarding UX • Information Architecture • Pricing Design • Landing Page Teardowns • Design and UX Audit • Product Metrics • Site & CMS Migration
I like great interface and an awesome user experience. If you are struggling to find a balance between UI and UX. I'm happy to exchange ideas with you on how to get started even you've no design experience.
I have led 10+ SaaS web projects and have run 100+ web audits that have made me realize two things: 1. There are some universal UX principles that work every time because they are based on how our eyes read and how our brain works; 2. Nearly everything can and should be tested, including those principles. Let's go through your web assets, wireframes, mockups or ideas together and see what can work best.
Even the best idea will fail if you can't present your product and engage your audience. With a background in coding and logical problem solving, my passion is to create meaningful and usable design systems that elevate the product value proposition. I can help you with: • Design and UX Audit • Product Evaluation Strategy • How to implement a UI/UX system within budget constraints? • What to consider when evaluating a business opportunity? • How to approach a site/app redesign?
Ammarah Ahmed
Fractional Consultant | Product UX/UI & CRO | Commercial Growth |ex-Delivery Hero & Alibaba
Worked with the Product team in most of my roles to review the customer journey and experience on the platform, evaluate the bottlenecks, identify growth techniques to increase micro-conversions throughout the interface in order to ensure the product was customer-friendly and easy-to-use
Ward van Gasteren
Freelance Growth Consultant @ GrowWithWard.com 🟠 | Startup Founder @ GrowthOrange | Always happy to help!
A good UX has a very big impact on Growth, thus is a topic that I am always very excited about. Feel free to ask me for input on how to design a Growth-minded product for PLG or have a look at my self-designed startup: www.GrowthOrange.com
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Say what you're stuck on. We line up the right person.
A session
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Live, one on one
30 min
Talk to someone who's done it. Thirty minutes, recorded.
After the call
Louis Camassa
Recording
You came in with
"Onboarding step 3, 40% drop-off."
You left with
"The real drop-off starts one screen earlier."
15:39 / 30:00
Jump to the moment
Keep the recording, summary, and takeaways. Yours.
What a design mentor does
Most people who book a design and UX call are founders building a product who have hit a design problem they cannot judge alone. The value is direction and validation, not visual polish.
A good call usually does some version of these:
- Reframe the problem. "The UI feels off" becomes a named cause: a confusing first run, the wrong audience, a feature you should cut. You leave knowing which one it is.
- Decide what to test. You decide which flows to put in front of users this week, before you build more.
- Fix the onboarding. The most common concrete UX problem: people sign up and never reach the moment the product proves its worth.
- Judge the UI. With no designer, a mentor gives you a straight read on whether the screen is good enough to ship or needs work.
The reader on this page is usually a builder who needs a second opinion on a product, not a logo.
You also leave with a record. After each call, the takeaways are written down for you, ready to keep or skip:
Karina KarnOnboarding teardownDrop the two signup fields you do not need, each one before the aha moment loses people.
Put the current onboarding in front of five users this week, before you rebuild a single screen.
KeepSkipName the one action that means a user felt the product work, then design the first run around it.
KeepSkipStart with the empty state, a blank first screen is where most new users stall and leave.
KeepSkipMistakes founders make
When founders design their own product, the same traps show up. The first step on a call is often recognizing which one you are in.
- Designing for yourself. you cannot unsee what you already know, so you overestimate how much a new user understands. The screen makes sense to you and almost no one else.
- Feature overload in the first version. the early product tries to do everything, which buries the one thing it does well and makes the whole thing harder to use.
- Treating UX as an afterthought. design gets bolted on at the end, so the flow that loses users was never really looked at.
- Skipping user research. decisions get made on opinion and taste instead of watching people try to use the thing.
Onboarding and activation
Onboarding is the design surface this audience hits hardest. People sign up, never reach the value, and drift off. Most new users never activate at all.
A mentor who has run this playbook helps you find where the flow leaks and what to change:
- Shorten time-to-value. get the user to the first useful moment as fast as possible, before they lose interest and leave.
- Define the activation event. name the one action that means a user has felt the product work, then design the flow around reaching it.
- Guide the empty state. do not drop people into a blank screen or a raw feed with no idea what to do first.
- Trigger on behavior, not time. prompts, checklists, and tooltips that respond to what the user does land better than a timed drip.
Mentors start diagnosing before the call. A typical first exchange after you book:
Nick SchwinghamerValidate before you build
The common trap on this topic is building before validating. People build the product, then come to a call to find out what they skipped. A mentor helps you put validation in front of the next sprint so you design the right thing.
The order that works, and that a mentor will walk you through:
- Test the value first. prove people want the outcome before you build the polished version of how it works.
- Five users finds most of it. testing with roughly five people surfaces the majority of usability problems. You do not need a big study.
- Use the cheapest prototype that works. paper, a clickable mockup, a fake-door test, or a manual Wizard-of-Oz behind the scenes, before you write production code.
- Ask the right questions. the goal is clear signal about whether people would pay, not polite encouragement that tells you nothing.
A rough screen tests whether people can use it. It does not test whether they want it. A mentor keeps those two questions separate.
two moves, in order
Test the want before the build
build the polished version, then hope people care
a fake-door or landing test that proves demand first
Then test the use
guess whether the flow makes sense
five users on a rough screen, watching where they stall
You design the right screen once
Both questions answered before the sprint, so the build serves something people want and can use.
The order matters: prove they want it before you polish how it works.
Hire a designer or DIY
A common question on these calls is whether to hire design help yet, and what kind. For most early founders, a full-time hire is too much too soon, and going it alone leaves gaps. The right answer usually sits in between.
- DIY with the right tools. Figma, Framer, and similar tools let a founder get a long way alone on early flows and prototypes, especially before you have users.
- A freelance designer. Bring in a product designer for a defined piece of work when a flow matters and you cannot judge it yourself.
- A design partner. A part-time partner who owns UX direction makes sense once design quality is part of why people pick you.
- A full-time hire. Usually the wrong first move. You commit to it once design is core and there is steady work to keep someone busy.
Skipping design has a rework cost
Founders who launch UX flows with no design input often pay for it later, when the thing has to be rebuilt after users hit the same wall. A mentor can tell you where that risk is worth taking and where it is not.
UI vs UX vs product design
If you are not a designer, the job titles blur together and it is hard to know who to hire or what skill you are missing. Here is the plain version so you can place yourself.
- UI design. How the interface looks and feels: layout, type, color, spacing, the visual surface a user touches.
- UX design. How the whole experience works: the flows, the information structure, the friction, whether a person can get the job done.
- Product design. The widest of the three: UX plus the product decisions about what to build, for whom, and why, tied to the business.
Most founders on this page need product and UX thinking first, and visual polish second. A mentor can tell you which gap is holding you back.
a signup screen, x-rayed
One email field and a Continue button, nothing else above the fold1. Social sign-in on top, password pushed to step two2. No company name, no credit card, nothing you do not need yet3. The one job: get a new user to the first useful moment4.
The visual
The single field, the button, the spacing. The surface a user sees and touches. UI is this layer, and it is the narrowest of the three.
The flow
The order of the steps and where friction sits. Social first, password later, fewer fields, so more people finish. That is UX.
The product decision
What you ask for at all. Cutting the company field is a product call, not a visual one, and it moves activation more than the button color ever will.
The job
The screen exists to reach the first useful moment. Anything that does not serve that gets cut.
One screen, three kinds of decision. Founders sweat the visual, and the product cut is usually what moves the number.
Pricing and packaging
Pricing comes up on design and UX calls more than you would expect, because how you package and present the product is a design decision too. The questions people bring are concrete.
- Charge from day one or offer free. whether to put up a paywall, run a trial, or open a freemium tier, based on your product and who buys it.
- Usage-based or flat. which model fits how people get value, and which one you can defend and explain.
- How to design your tiers. what goes in each plan so the choice is obvious instead of overwhelming.
- Whether to show price publicly. when putting pricing on the site helps you and when hiding it costs you trust.
A mentor who has priced real products helps you pick a number you can stand behind and present it so the value lands before the price does.
Packaging is a design decision. Overwhelming tiers push the work onto the buyer, and the move is fewer, clearer plans.
Moving into UX design
A share of people on this topic are designers making a career move, usually from graphic design into UX or product. The change is more mindset than software.
- Shift the core question. graphic design asks "does this look good." UX asks "can someone use this." That shift drives everything else.
- Learn the fundamentals. user flows, information architecture, cognitive load, and the common usability heuristics that good UX work leans on.
- Build case studies, not a gallery. two or three projects that show your process and decisions beat a wall of polished screens with no reasoning.
- Reposition the work you have. much of your existing graphic work can be reframed with UX context instead of starting your portfolio from zero.
A mentor who made this jump can review your portfolio, tell you what a hiring team looks for, and give you a straight read on the market.
a case study, x-rayed
The problem: users abandoned checkout at the address step1. What you tried: three versions, tested with eight people each2. The decision: split the form and autofill the city from the zip3. The result: completion up, and the reasoning a hiring team can follow4.
The problem, framed
A problem defined before any pixels. A hiring team wants to see you name the job first.
The process
What you tested and why. Three tries beats one polished mockup, because it shows how you think.
The decision
The specific call you made and the reasoning behind it. This is the part a gallery leaves out.
The outcome
What changed, in numbers where you have them. Proof the work moved something.
Two case studies like this say more than twenty polished screens. The reasoning is what a hiring team reads for.
Agencies moving upmarket
Design and branding agencies and freelancers are the other services wing on this topic, usually trying to escape commodity pricing and win bigger clients. The constraint is rarely the work. It is positioning and price.
- Price on value, not hours. billing by the hour caps what you earn and trains clients to see you as a vendor. Pricing on the outcome changes the conversation.
- Find your ceiling. most agencies have no idea how high they could price and undercharge for years without testing the limit. A mentor helps you find the number.
- Win on positioning and ideas. bigger clients buy a point of view and a result, not a scope of deliverables. The pitch has to change with the price.
- Reconsider your ICP. moving upmarket usually means firing the clients who keep you cheap and choosing the ones with real budgets.
When to book a call
You do not need a giant question. Bring the product decision you keep circling. The most useful moments to book:
- The product is built but not selling. you launched something real and almost no one is buying, and you cannot tell whether it is the product, the message, or the audience.
- Your onboarding does not activate. people sign up and never reach the value, and you do not know where the flow loses them.
- You cannot judge your own UI. you have no designer and need a straight second opinion before you launch or rebuild.
- You are stuck before building. you have a prototype or an idea and want to validate it before pouring more time into code.
- You are changing careers or repricing. you are a designer moving into UX, or an agency trying to move upmarket, and want someone who has done it.
Every mentor on GrowthMentor is vetted before they are accepted, and fewer than 5% of applicants get in. The people who take these calls have shipped products, so you get help turning a half-built thing into something users complete, validate, and pay for. One membership gives you unlimited access to the whole network: browse by what you are stuck on, read reviews, and book directly on a mentor's calendar.
You can also run it in reverse: post what you are stuck on as a help request, and mentors raise their hands to take it.
What people book design and UX calls about
Rarely what they end up solving. The ask on the booking form is usually a symptom, and a mentor who has shipped real products recognizes the pattern underneath it. Three that come up again and again:
walked in as, walked out as
Walked in as
A UI problem
The screen just looks off.
Walked out as
A hierarchy problem
Nothing tells the eye where to go.
Walked in as
An onboarding problem
People sign up and vanish.
Walked out as
A first-value problem
They never reached the useful moment.
Walked in as
A design problem
We need a designer to fix this.
Walked out as
A validation problem
You built the wrong thing first.
Three calls, one mechanic. The problem that leaves the room is never the one that walked in.
Why GrowthMentor
Every mentor on GrowthMentor is vetted before they are accepted, and fewer than 5% of applicants get in. They are founders, product designers, and operators who have shipped real products, not a marketplace of freelancers pitching for the job.
Because the network is broad, you are not stuck with one specialist when your problem spans product, flow, and price. You can pressure-test an onboarding flow this week, then get a straight read on your pricing the next, each time with someone who has done that exact thing.
Calls this month
Book the fourth call, or the fortieth. Nothing on this receipt changes.
People who were exactly where you are.
GrowthMentor enables us to swiftly get a world-class expert to give us guidance on any marketing issue or question in a matter of days.
Hamel Shah · Co-Founder
Read Hamel's storyKnowing I can always book a call to help me clarify what I'm doing is the best feeling in the world.
Lena Sesardic · Product Manager
Read Lena's storyI like to set my own strategies and then get help from experts to improve on them and check if I'm on the right track.
Minh · Solo Founder
Read Minh's storyIt gave me fast access to expert-level insights that I couldn't get from academic research or user surveys alone.
Nicola Rubino · Growth Marketing Consultant
Read Nicola's storySometimes I'm stuck at one step and all I need is someone who can share experiences of what they did when they were in my situation.
Annie Chen · Head of Marketing
Read Annie's storyI enjoy having pretty much instant access to a pool of worldwide, expert mentors who are keen to share their expertise and help others.
Carlos Terol · Co-Founder
Read Carlos's storyAsk ChatGPT
Don’t take our word for it.
Ask ChatGPT what it really knows about design and ux mentors and GrowthMentor, then decide for yourself.
Before you join
What people ask before their first call.
Mostly product direction, not visual critique. The common asks are reframing a vague product problem into something testable, fixing onboarding that loses users, deciding what to validate before building, judging a UI when you have no designer, and pricing or career moves. The mentors here have shipped products, so the help is practical.
Yes, and this is exactly who most people on this page are. You do not need a design title to get value. Bring a specific product problem, like an onboarding flow that does not convert or a UI you cannot judge, and you will leave with a concrete next step.
For most early founders: DIY early flows with tools like Figma or Framer, bring in a freelance designer for the work that matters, and only hire full-time once design is core to why people pick you. A mentor can read your stage and tell you which move is right now.
UI is how the interface looks and feels. UX is how the whole experience works and whether a person can get the job done. Product design is the widest of the three: UX plus decisions about what to build and why. Most founders need product and UX thinking first, and visual polish second.
This is the most common concrete UX problem here, and it is usually not a pricing issue. People never reach the moment the product proves its worth, so they leave. A mentor helps you shorten time-to-value, name the activation event, fix the empty state, and trigger guidance on behavior instead of a timer.
Test the value hypothesis before the polished build. Put the cheapest prototype that works in front of users, a paper sketch, a clickable mockup, a fake-door test, and ask questions that get clear signal about whether they would pay. A mentor helps you set this up so you build the right thing.
Fewer than people expect. Testing with roughly five users surfaces the majority of usability problems, so you do not need a big formal study to learn what is broken. A mentor can help you choose what to test and how to run a quick round this week.
Usually a lot. Feature overload is one of the most common early mistakes: the product tries to do everything and buries the one thing it does well. A mentor helps you find the single core job and cut the rest, so the first version is simple enough to use and judge.
It depends on your product, your buyer, and how fast people feel value. There is no universal answer, and the right call changes your whole funnel. A mentor who has priced products can give you a straight read on whether to put up a paywall, run a trial, or open a free tier.
Often yes, but it depends on who buys and how complex the deal is. Hiding price can cost you trust with self-serve buyers and save friction with enterprise ones. A mentor can tell you which side your product is on and how to present the number when you do show it.
The core shift is from "does this look good" to "can someone use this." Learn user flows, information architecture, and the common usability heuristics, then build two or three case studies that show your process, not just polished screens. A mentor who made the jump can review your portfolio and read the market for you.
Price on the value you deliver, not the hours you bill, and reposition the offer around outcomes bigger clients care about. Most agencies undercharge because they never test their real ceiling. A mentor who has moved upmarket can help you reprice, sharpen positioning, and choose the clients worth chasing.
Still have questions? See all FAQs →
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Every face here has already solved what you're working on in design and ux. You're one call away.