Helping startups to scale 🦄 ✦ Driving Halo Lab 7 → 8-figures ARR & having fun ✦ Founder with Design in ❤️

I run Design & Tech Agency helping brands become TOP 1%.

✦ $530 M raised + 9-figure exits by client startups 
✦ 500+ projects delivered
✦ 99+ international awards
✦ 4.9 / 5.0 average rating on Clutch from 80+ verified reviews

This is a real impact in numbers.

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Over the past 15 yrs I’ve been shaping digital products and brands for category‑defining companies — from NOKIA and OPERA to high‑growth SaaS and Web3 start‑ups.

My core focus is design leadership at scale: I enter as a strategic partner, craft a vision, and lead multidisciplinary teams all the way from concept to launch.

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I specialize in:

⤷  B2B SaaS Product Design | Guiding startups and enterprise spin‑ups from 0 to 1 — turning complex tech into intuitive, emotionally resonant experiences.

⤷  High‑Performance Digital Presence | Building conversion‑focused brand websites that turn first impressions into lasting growth.

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Have BIG idea in mind?
Contact me directly: inquiry@halo-lab.com

Artem Borysenko

You can hire a designer.

Or you can hire a design brain.

One gives you beautiful screens.
The other gives you a product that thinks.

When you hire a single designer, you get skills.
When you hire a team that works as one brain, you get experience that compounds.

At Halo Lab — Your Digital Partner, our teams don’t work in silos.
The UX researcher sees what frustrates users.
The product designer connects it to business goals.
The UI designer turns it into clarity and trust.
The developer translates it into something fast and functional.

Each person covers a blind spot the others can’t.
And together, they don’t just design, they solve.

That’s the difference between design as a task and design as a system.
Between a pretty interface and a product that scales, converts, and feels effortless to use.

When founders realize this, everything changes:

1. They stop hiring portfolios.
2. They start hiring thinking systems - teams that anticipate problems before they appear, align design with ROI, and build products that last.

If you’re scaling your product, don’t just hire a designer.
Hire a brain that’s trained to think like your users and build like your business depends on it.

Find you team https://bit.ly/49wqB0p

🔔 Follow Artem Borysenko for more updates!

Founder @ Halo Lab ✦ Design & Tech Agency Helping Brands Become TOP 1%

You’ve raised your Series A.

Now you’re proving you can deliver at scale.

And every week of delay costs runway, users, and momentum.
The big question?
Who’s actually going to build this thing?
You have three choices and each comes with a hidden price.

1. The dedicated team.
(Agency/product squad model)
Fastest to launch.
Move as one unit.
Cross-functional by default.
→ Best for: founders who need traction now and can’t afford to spend 3 months hiring.

2. Freelancers.
They’re flexible, affordable, and perfect for low-risk experiments.
But you become the PM, the QA, and the glue holding everything together.
When people churn, rework kills speed.
→ Best for: quick feature spikes or marketing tests, not your core product.

3. In-house team.
The long-term bet.
You get culture, domain memory, and control.
But it’s slow and expensive.
Median SWE comp in the U.S. sits around $187 K/year, and that’s before benefits or churn.
→ Best for: protecting core IP and scaling once product-market fit is locked.

My take? Go hybrid by design.
1. Dedicated team: ship your core product in < 90 days.
2. In-house team: retain knowledge and own the moat.
3. Freelancers: plug niche gaps when speed matters.

Re-evaluate every quarter: velocity, cost per feature, defect rate.
Because at Series A, your biggest risk isn’t cost, it’s time.

✦ At Halo Lab — Your Digital Partner, we help Series A founders scale with dedicated product squads - ready to ship fast, adapt faster, and grow alongside your in-house team.

♻️ Share this to help make a good choice.
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 Dedicated Team vs. Freelancers vs. In-House 

“We need a redesign.”

This is how half of discovery calls begin.

However, 10 minutes into the discussion and it’s obvious - they need a problem statement.

The product is not broken. 
The understanding of the problem is.

Founders say: “Our checkout flow is poor.” 
Users say: “I don’t trust this payment form.”

The difference? One adds a feature. The other builds the right feature.

A good problem statement is not an educated guess.
It’s that moment that your research turns into clarity. 
It translates chaos into focus.

Here is what strong product teams do completely differently:

1. They do not start their process around “what to build.” 
They start their process around “who’s struggling – and why.”

2. They use data and real voices, not assumptions. 

3. They state the problem in a way that the whole team- designer, PM, and CEO can read and ingest in an instant.

When you get the problem right the design almost builds itself.
Your next big UX breakthrough will not come from adding another feature. 
It will come from rewriting the question you are trying to answer.

♻️ Share if it resonates.
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The hardest thing about building an AI product is getting people to trust what it does.

You can create a great model all you want, but as soon as users feel the slightest bit of uncertainty, they are going to ponder, hesitate, and leave.

When founders build trust into the product experience, three things happen fast.

1. Users stop second-guessing and start exploring. First session activation goes up because they understand the what and whys.

2. Every click of trust compounds itself into usage, retention, and upsell. Without trust, the best AI feature will remain unused.

3. You do not have to wait for product market fit to learn how users actually feel. Trust patterns can save you weeks of guessing, and reduce the launch chaos.

4. Transparent UX with design-based trust cuts confusion before it even reaches support. No more "I am left wondering why it said that?" tickets or bad reviews for hallucinations.

Most AI products are built for power. 
The real winners are built for confidence.

✦

At Halo Lab — Your Digital Partner, we help founders design AI products users trust enough to actually use and pay for.
If that’s the stage you’re at, let’s chat.

♻️ Share this to help others build AI products.
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UI for AI products

Most companies still treat a design system as a visual asset.

In reality, it behaves more like infrastructure.

When a design system is used by a company, it can help reduce costs for all the products the company already has. Also, using a design system can reduce the costs of making new products by different teams in the company.

Here’s where the real financial return shows up:

1. Reduction of duplicated efforts across teams.

When multiple teams are rebuilding and recreating similar elements, there are three new associated costs for each team: a new design, a new coded version, and the need for each team to perform QA. With the implementation of a design token system, this cycle is not necessary.

2. Component scalability across product portfolios.

When a company builds a system to support a group of products, they make more money by creating one design and using it many times for all the products in the group. This is why companies have been able to reduce the time it takes to get products to market by 20-40% without adding more staff.

3. Patterns decrease cognitive load and time spent deciding.

Once an organization sets up design patterns to support their onboarding, dashboards, permission systems, navigational structures, and error state designs, teams won't have to argue about the most important design principles. 

4. The cost of change decreases dramatically.

With no design system: A rebrand, accessibility update, or micro-interaction change triggers weeks of redesign and recoding..
With a design system: Update the source → every product updates automatically.

✦

A strong design system improves:

- Time to market.
- Cross-platform trust.
- Developer throughput.
- Conversion and activation.

✦

Build your design system for the next three products you launch. 
You will begin seeing returns on your investment in the early years.

🔔 Follow Artem Borysenko for more updates!

Your product already makes users feel something.

The question is what?

If your users don’t feel the right thing, they won’t do the right thing.
They’ll bounce, hesitate, mistrust, churn.

Over 500+ products, I’ve learned that the best products aren’t the ones with the most features. They’re the ones with the clearest emotional tone.

Every product leans into one of three emotional modes.

1️⃣ Calm → “I feel safe here.”
Perfect for: health, finance, productivity, wellness.
How it’s built: soft palettes, clear language, gentle interactions, no pressure.

2️⃣ Competent → “I trust this.”
Perfect for: SaaS, B2B, dashboards, enterprise.
How it’s built: structured layouts, predictable behavior, strong signals of reliability (performance, clarity, proof).

3️⃣ Empowering → “I can do this.”
Perfect for: fitness, learning, creativity.
How it’s built: energetic visuals, progress celebrations, milestones, personalization.

When the emotional tone doesn’t match the product’s purpose:
1. A data tool feels playful → trust drops.
2. A wellness app feels intense → stress rises.
3. A learning app feels sterile → motivation dies.

Emotion either reduces friction or adds it. 
What to do before your next sprint.

✦ Pick your emotional tone before UI design.
✦ Build it into your design system (colors, spacing, motion, language)
✦ Test the gut reaction early (“How did this flow make you feel?”)
✦ Make sure every new feature reinforces that emotional mode.

We design products that make users feel the right thing.
It’s about building experiences users want to return to.

♻️ Share this to help others catch hearts.
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You didn’t just hire a team.

You hired a risk.

That’s what most founders realize by Sprint 2, but by then, momentum is already bleeding out.

What starts as “a good fit” quickly turns into:

→ Delayed updates.
→ Vanishing senior talent.
→ Quiet budget drift.
→ Process that feels more defensive than proactive.

It rarely breaks all at once.
It just slowly stops working.

At Halo Lab — Your Digital Partner, we’ve inherited dozens of these “almost there” projects.
And we’ve learned to spot the early signals that most teams ignore.

Here’s how experienced founders filter for risk before it shows up on a roadmap:

1. Ask who stays after kickoff.
Bait-and-switch team structures are common. 
Real partners show you the core team from day one.

2. Low prices don’t remove cost. 
Into rework. Into scope creep. 
Into things no one “thought about” until it’s too late.

3. Their process should flex around your product.
If their workflow can’t adapt to your stack, roadmap, or internal rhythm, you're buying overhead.

4. Silence isn’t a “working phase.” It’s a liability.
Communication isn’t a nice-to-have. 
It’s part of delivery.

5. IP, code ownership, and access - settle it early and in writing.
No smart founder leaves this vague.

6. Domain experience is a requirement.
A capable team isn’t enough. 
You need people who’ve solved your kind of problems before.

7. If there’s no post-launch plan, you’re the plan.
Support, iteration, and continuity should already be mapped.

We partner with founders who know that reliable execution is rare and valuable.
If that’s where you are, you’ll feel the difference from day one.

♻️ Share this to help others fint a right partner.
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I can’t remember the last time I used an app that didn’t ask me to share, rate, or “engage.”

Every product today (even in B2B) is designed for an algorithm.
Google’s. LinkedIn’s. App Store’s. TikTok’s.

We’ve quietly shifted from designing for people to designing for distribution.
The algorithm rewards speed, volume, stickiness.
And so we chase it - with notifications, widgets, and “viral moments.”

But something gets lost along the way.

When was the last time a product was designed for:
✦ Silence?
✦ Reflection?
✦ A human mistake that wasn’t punished instantly?

You've trained our teams to ask,
“How will this perform in search?”
“Will this trigger engagement?”
“Will this help retention metrics?”

Not:

“Will this make someone feel seen, understood, or at ease?”
We measure time-on-page, not peace of mind.
We optimize funnels, not flow.

And in doing so, we risk turning our users into an interface between two algorithms, feeding signals back and forth.

Maybe the next wave of great design won’t be about more engagement.
Maybe it’ll be about creating digital spaces that breathe.
Moments that respect our attention instead of stealing it.
Because the best products don’t just perform, they pause.
They make us feel something.

What’s one product you’ve used lately that still feels designed for humans, not algorithms?

♻️ Share this if it resonates.
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I sat in a meeting where a CEO said something I'll never forget:

“I don’t need it to look beautiful. I need it to make money.”

At the time, it stung a little.
We’d poured weeks into crafting the perfect interface.
But he was right.

If your design doesn't move revenue or retention, it's wallpaper.
That moment changed how we work at Halo Lab — Your Digital Partner.
Now, every design decision starts with a business question:

1. What does this screen earn?
2. How does this feature reduce churn?
3. Can this interaction build trust faster?

We stopped chasing “nice-to-have” visuals and started designing for impact: shorter time to value, higher conversion, more clarity.

Last quarter, applying this thinking helped a SaaS client cut trial-to-paid time by 40%. Design decisions became revenue decisions.

What's one screen in your product that looks great but doesn't move the needle?

🔔 Follow Artem Borysenko for more updates!

Fractional CFO | Helping Founders Scale Beyond $2M ARR with Strategic Finance & OKRs | Founder @ FounderFirst

There's a point where you just can't wing it anymore.

Usually around $2M ARR.

When growth is real, but messy. When the business works (but the numbers don't fully add up). When pricing gets risky, hiring gets heavy, and suddenly every "quick decision" starts showing up in your burn.

That's where I come in.

I step in as your Fractional CFO to help turn momentum into structure.

We build pricing, capital allocation, operating constraints, and targets the team actually runs on.

Over the last decade, I've worked with 20+ early and growth-stage companies, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, across SaaS, fintech, edtech, and agencies. I've helped scale revenue from $500K to $20M, grow teams from 10 to 200+, and build finance and ops foundations from scratch.

I've been in the room for pivots, layoffs, down rounds, near-bankruptcies, and exits - not as an observer, but owning the financial logic behind what happened next.

In 2024, I founded FounderFirst to go deeper with this work, helping teams build finance that actually supports growth, long before they're ready for a full-time CFO. Since then, we've partnered with 70+ founder-led startups and SMBs, including leading accelerators and venture studios.

That's the professional story. Here's the real one.

I grew up in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria - no English, no tech exposure, no obvious path.

At 17, I taught myself English.
At 19, I earned a scholarship to study in the U.S.

I arrived with a suitcase, less than $300, and no backup plan, and did whatever scrappy thing it took to stay afloat.

Eventually, I found my way into startups. The chaos, the ownership, the pressure, for the first time, I felt like I fit.

What started as survival became a decade of building behind the scenes.

Now I bring all of it - the scrappiness, the strategy, and the systems - to founders who are ready for real financial leadership.

When I'm not deep in spreadsheets or board decks, you'll find me hiking a national park or nose-deep in a book. (Always open to recommendations.)

If the next set of decisions actually matters, let's talk: https://bit.ly/3NEYTqT

Mariya Valeva

He was born in one of the poorest countries in the world.
And he built a $9.5 billion company…
and made his product free.

Luis von Ahn grew up in Guatemala, a country where most kids drop out of school by age 12.
Where learning English could change your life,
if you could afford it.
His mother was a single parent. A doctor.
She spent everything she had on him.
When he was 8, she bought him a computer instead of a vacation.
He started coding. And dreaming.
But dreaming wasn’t enough.

To get into college in the U.S., he needed to take the TOEFL exam,
but it wasn’t even offered in Guatemala.
So he crossed the border. Paid in foreign currency.
Took a test that said, “prove you're good enough… if you can afford it.”

He never forgot that moment.
He made it. Barely.

Graduated summa cum laude. 
Got a PhD. 
Invented CAPTCHA. 
Sold reCAPTCHA to Google.

He could’ve stayed in Silicon Valley forever.
Instead, he built Duolingo.
Not as a product.
As revenge on a system that made kids feel small for being poor.

He poured years into it. The early versions flopped.
Gamification was a desperate pivot. Investors pulled out.
People laughed at the idea of making it free.
But he didn’t stop.
He hired people smarter than him.
He fought for funding.
He spent sleepless nights tweaking tiny things - the streak, the owl, the sound a notification makes.
Because every time he wanted to give up, he remembered 16-year-old Luis.
On a bus to another country.
Trying to take a test he could barely afford… just to be seen.

Today, that same boy runs one of the most powerful education companies in the world:
📱 500M+ users
🌍 Courses in 40+ languages
📈 $9.5B valuation
💸 Still free
But the numbers aren’t the win.
The win is this:
A kid in rural India is learning English - for free.
A refugee in Germany is learning the local language - for free.
A girl in Guatemala doesn’t have to leave her country to chase her dreams.
Because Luis already did that for her.

This isn’t just a story about a startup.
It’s a story about a man who turned every closed door into an open platform.
An empire, built not on profit,
but on principle.

Fractional CFO for B2B SaaS ($2M+ ARR) | Founder @FounderFirst

40 law firms turned her down.
She sued the U.S. government. 
Today, her startup is worth $11B.

Luana didn’t come here with a dream.
She came here with a decision.
To never live the life her parents had.
To find a way out.
Even if it broke her.

In Brazil, she trained at one of the toughest ballet schools in the world.
Her days were 14 hours long.
They tested her pain tolerance by burning her skin with cigarettes.

At 17, she walked away from ballet.
Taught herself English.
Got into MIT.
Graduated with degrees in math and computer science.
While her classmates chased hedge funds, she was chasing something else:
A question.
“What if anyone could trade on real-world events - like elections - the same way they trade stocks?”

That question became Kalshi.
A prediction market platform.
The kind of platform that didn’t exist in the U.S.
Because the government didn’t want it to.
She was told no, over and over.

40 law firms turned her down.
Regulators stalled.
Investors warned her to walk away.
Instead, she sued the U.S. government.
And she won.

In 2024, Kalshi became the first federally regulated prediction market in the country.
It handled $500M+ in election trades.
Raised $1B.
Partnered with Robinhood and Solana.
And hit an $11B valuation.
Luana was 29.
And officially, the youngest self-made female billionaire on the planet.

No hacks.
Just a woman who refused to quit, even when the system told her to sit down.
That’s not a startup story.
It’s a survival story.
And she wrote every word of it herself.

Ever had a “brilliant idea”…
that never turned into anything?

Ideas are exciting.
They come with clarity, momentum, and that rush of this could really work.

But turning an idea into something real?
That’s the part no one prepares you for.
Because between idea and execution lives a messy middle:
• Trade-offs you didn’t expect
• Constraints that aren’t in the slide deck
• Systems that don’t talk to each other
• Models that work beautifully… until they meet real customers
• People problems, tech problems, money problems, all at once

Execution is rarely a straight line.
It’s craftsmanship.
And that means rethinking, rewriting, rebuilding - again and again.

The idea is just the spark.
But building? That’s the fire you have to keep feeding.
So if you’re in the weeds right now, keep going.
This is the part where the real product - and the real company - gets made.

*video credits: growasentrepreneurs insta

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