Marry a Designer pls.

Don't be stupid, just do it and thank me later.

Luca Stirbat
Luca Stirbat
July 14, 2025
6 min read

A quick word from the author:

Hello my favorite royal, loyal subjects,

I recently read something on someone’s instagram story: To build a vision, one must consume information, filter it and transform it.

That’s what I’m doing every week when I’m writing this newsletter and I like to think that I’m helping you build your vision as well.

Here’s the thought of the week from my side:

design > engineering.

With the recent advancements, good design will be the real differentiator for the next 5 years. So if you know a good designer, start taking them out for drinks or strategically marry them. And if you don’t, become a designer yourself.

Learning Materials:

“Streamed and unstreamed responses describe how an AI agent sends its answer to the user. With a streamed response, the agent starts sending words as soon as it generates them. The user sees the text grow on the screen in real time. This feels fast and lets the user stop or change the request early. It is useful for long answers and chat-like apps.”

“The way to finding my own voice in design and developing a taste that feels authentic to me was simple. I stopped looking for inspiration online.

Growing your taste is an act that requires effort and intention, not mindless media consumption. Analog media has become my main source of inspiration, because it isn’t dictated by algorithms. It has no built-in popularity filter. It doesn’t tell me what’s “good” but leaves the decision to me.”

“As designers, we often need to share our work and seek feedback from stakeholders. But sometimes, things don’t go as planned — people might zoom in on tiny details, or shift the conversation to another topic that’s outside of the scope.”

“While brands have long used aspiration in their marketing, today’s strategies feel noticeably different. The focus has shifted from luxury and exclusivity to escapism itself, and it’s becoming increasingly visible across industries. Consider Coca-Cola’s “Real Magic” campaign, for instance, which uses AI-generated imagery to create whimsical dreamscapes. Or Apple’s recent “Mother Nature” ad, which reframes a corporate report about the brand’s support of environmental and social issues as a high-concept film starring Octavia Spencer. In London, Gucci’s “Gucci Cosmos” series invites visitors into a surreal world of time travel and design history.”

“What is system design? In my view, if software design is how you assemble lines of code, system design is how you assemble services. The primitives of software design are variables, functions, classes, and so on. The primitives of system design are app servers, databases, caches, queues, event buses, proxies, and so on.”

Tool of the Week: LLM SEO Trend Analyzer

What are people asking chatGPT and other AI’s nowadays?

Just like we have all sorts of SEO analyzer tools for Google, now we have an analyzer of AI search.

What can you do with this? Idk, maybe optimize your content, maybe follow the trends for your social media content, or maybe just understand where humanity is at this point in time.

Startup Idea of the Week: Git for Money

You know what’s really sexy for developers?

Those sweet, sweet green boxes on Github. They show just how commited you are…

So here’s the idea: a GitHub-style dashboard… but for your income. Think of it as a contribution graph, except instead of commits, it’s cash. Daily income plotted out like green squares of financial pride. Whether you’re a solo indie hacker, a freelancer, or running a baby startup, this is your new favorite tool.


How It Works:

  • You securely link Stripe, PayPal, or your bank.

  • Each day, your income (or your startup’s revenue) gets plotted on a grid that looks suspiciously like your GitHub contributions chart.

  • Green means money came in. Dark green? You’re on fire.

  • You can keep it private or share it publicly to flex (or cry) with your peers.


Why This Works:

  • Founders love streaks. It’s the same psychology as Duolingo, GitHub, or gym check-ins—except this one is directly tied to money.

  • Creates a habit of financial awareness without the stress of spreadsheets.

  • And for businesses? This becomes the gateway to more advanced features: revenue forecasting, dashboards, lightweight financial statements—whatever you’d normally pay a boring accountant for.


Go-to-Market Plan:

  • Target indie founders, solopreneurs, and “build in public” types on Twitter and LinkedIn.

  • Partner with no-code platforms, Stripe Atlas communities, or startup accelerators.

  • Make it fun to share: turn your income grid into a social badge, just like GitHub.


What Could Go Wrong?

  • Someone connects a dead bank account and sees nothing but white squares. Panic ensues.

  • “Public revenue” gets mistaken for success and fuels unhealthy comparison culture.

  • Your income chart looks like a heartbeat monitor. And not in a good way.

But hey—money is emotional. And we already track everything else. Time to make financial streaks a thing.

Ok, hear me out, you should try: Design Lightning

This one comes straight from Randy Hunt, Head of Design at Notion.

“I’ll describe a specific ritual that we do. Because a lot of this is about rituals – simple, powerful ideas that you commit to and repeat.

One of them is something we call Design Lightning, which we do every two weeks.

Every single person on the team shares what they’re working on. It’s a broadcast thing, one to many, so there’s no dialogue and it’s not critique.

We just blast through it – about 20 people in 30 minutes. There is one slide deck, and we have the names of Slack channels at the bottom where people can learn more.

You get this cadence of everyone sharing at a similar fidelity, at a similar time. The speed of it is actually part of the fun, and part of the challenge.”

It really gives us the highlights of what you’re doing – “Here’s where I’m at with this thing.” It might be a load of screenshots of variations, or it might be a click-through prototype.

And we record those, and we share them with the whole company. People can download the deck and flip through it at their own speed.

We end up getting all this feedback, from engineers, product managers and all these other people. They understand what we’re working on, and that’s a really powerful thing.

What’s going on for us: (thanks for asking!)

  • We’ve managed to get a working prototype of our new startup:

No, we’re not reinventing TicTacToe. This is actually the result of a single prompt we issued our agentic workflow. A fully working game of TicTacToe, built inside the Godot Game Engine. We’re working hard next week to make it build more complex games like roguelites and top-down survival games.

  • In 2 weeks time, we’re organizing our first SF hackathon: HaHaHackathon. More details soon.

  • This weekend, we were lucky enough to attend the AI Summit at Viva Frontier Tower. The news about who presented what, why and how the world will end will be posted next week on Noi Venim Din Viitor.

  • Also, one of our ReaktorX companies needs help: If you’re a builder that wants to play around with AI and help HAIP automate a part of their process, here’s the tech requirments: https://haip-space.notion.site/brief. DM me if you want to jump in and help them build.

Ok, we’re done here, now get lost. Go make something amazing.

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Luca Stirbat
Written by
Luca Stirbat
ReaktorX Team
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