Dane Lyons
I've spent 20+ years designing and building things on the web. My creations have collectively received over a billion views.
One of the most valuable lessons I've learned is the importance of creative confidence. Most things you put all of your effort designing and releasing into the world will not go viral. But don't depend on virality for validation. Learn to love the creation process. Release with confidence, and it will eventually pay off.
I created v1Labs as a space to explore design concepts. It's an ongoing side project I plan to work on for the next 20 years. I will publish and iterate on design concepts in public. I'll share my thought process as designs evolve. If you are interested in collaborating, send a design tip and if it inspires an iteration, I'll be happy to give attribution.
Project History
Co-founder
We're building a design system for product marketing and sales teams to collaborate and quickly create personalized assets. Teams can create sophisticated asset templates with or without design help. Our snippet library concept makes it easy to reuse content such as customer quotes, pricing tables, and value statements.
Rasterly
Founder
I designed and sold thousands of generative art NFTs on the fx(hash) platform. Unfortunately, too many people abused popular NFT platforms contributing to a decline in crypto and NFT popularity. This was some of the most challenging and fulfilling work of my career. I'm excited for the future of crypto.
CPO/CTO
In the early days, HackerNoon was dependent on Medium to publish content from contributing writers. I assembled a very small team to design and build a content management system from scratch scaling to over 10k writers and millions of monthly readers.
Sherlock (Knowtify side-project)
Co-Founder
User engagement is usually not very transparent. You can't login to a typical analytics platform and figure out which of your users are engaged an ready to activate/upgrade and who is likely to churn. We built an engagement scoring system to make it easy to prioritize sales and CS activity.
Relay (Knowtify side-project)
Co-Founder
We built a tool that integrated with Segment and Slack to allow product teams to filter and get notified of important user events as they happen. Unfortunately this was a side project cut short by an acquisition. I regret not spending a year iterating to get to product market fit.
Knowtify (acquired by Kissmetrics)
Co-Founder
Knowtify was an email design platform that helped teams deliver personalized marketing messages at scale. We were part of the Techstars 2015 Cloud program in San Antonio.
Saygent
Lead Developer
We built an audio analysis platform using Mechanical Turk to evaluate subjective criteria. For example, a company might record customer support calls and need to organize calls by people who sound distressed, happy, or any other subjective criteria. This tech would be easy to build today with AI.
Kosmix (acquired by Walmart Labs)
Developer
I worked on a project called Tweetbeat which used early AI-like technology to find all the tweets about a given topic in realtime. I helped design and build an interface to surface Tweets from the 2010 FIFA World Cup. We then partnered with TV networks, MySpace, and the Golden State Warriors.
Blizzard Internet Marketing
Developer
We created and marketed websites for bed and breakfasts, hotels, and resorts. I helped transition the company from building static HTML websites to content management systems using Wordpress. While I had been writing code for years prior to Blizzard, this was my first chance to do it professionally. I learned a lot in the process and appreciate the opportunity.
Sponsors
Reach out if you are interested in sponsoring design iterations. Each sponsorship will receive a permanent ad on v1Labs along with a tweet mention. Get a deal before traffic ramps up!
Hire Me
If you'd like to use any design concepts you see on v1Labs, feel free to steal my ideas for free. No attribution required, although it is appreciated. I'm also available to help adapt concepts into purpose built React or Vue components for $150/hr with a 5 hour minimum.
