Nice to meet you!
I’m a systems-driven product designer with roots in hospitality, focused on turning complex data into experiences that feel simple and human. As RISR’s founding designer, I helped take the product from zero to $1M+ ARR in 18 months while shaping our workflows and design system.
I also help run Studio Bumi, where I design and cook immersive dining experiences. Now I’m looking for a role where my product craft and love for hospitality meet, and Loyalist feels like the perfect intersection.
Why Loyalist?
I’m a food-obsessed designer that frequents Resy, Opentable, and has an Instagram folder with 1,300+ saved posts about New York restaurants. I’ve been watching food documentaries since I was a kid from Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives all the way through every season of Chef’s Table.
I’ve also spent my career designing zero-to-one systems for early-stage startups, serving hundreds of thousands of users and contributing to $6M+ in revenue. But the thing I care most about is how technology can enhance real-world experiences, especially anything food-related.
Loyalist is the first product I’ve seen that treats hospitality the way I experience it: as curation, care, and personalization. It’s what I try to create in every pop-up I design, and what’s missing in most guest experiences today.
My long-term work will sit at the intersection of food and technology. Loyalist feels like the perfect place for those two sides of my life to finally meet.
RISR
Designing the system that helps advisors guide the largest wealth transfer in history
Role
Founding Product Designer
Timeline
V1 in ~4 months → $1M ARR in 18 months
Format
Desktop Web App
Tooling
Figma, React, TypeScript, Tailwind
Zero to one in 4 months.
$0 to $1M ARR in 18 months.
I joined RISR as the lead product designer and UX engineer from day one. We shipped V1 in four months, closed our first customers, and within 18 months the product passed $1M ARR and entered enterprise adoption.
RISR sits inside one of the most human parts of finance: helping business owners transition out of the companies that define their identity and legacy.
My job was to design the product that makes those conversations possible.
Advisors & business owners are misaligned
RISR’s founder identified a simple but high-stakes gap:
Advisors did not know how to guide business owners before a transition.
Business owners did not know what a successful exit required.
Millions of SMB owners will retire in the next decade, triggering one of the largest wealth transfers in American history. Advisors will play a defining role in whether those exits succeed, financially and emotionally.
Yet the conversations today are scattered, manual, and uncomfortable.
V1: Proving the Model in 4 Months
For V1, I worked closely with the founder and CPO to build something powerful but familiar: a single insights summary that advisors could print, hand to a client, and use to shape a real conversation.
The summary covered five areas: current valuation, goal valuation, risk assessment, growth opportunities, and clear recommendations. Everything lived on one screen.
The workflow was intentionally linear:
Advisor generates a custom intake link
Business owner submits data
Advisor reviews and finalizes inputs
Advisor generates the insights summary
Advisor exports a PDF to use in client meetings
V1 validated our hypothesis:
The Turning Point: Why V1 Couldn't Drive Deep Adoption
As advisors used RISR more seriously, a pattern emerged. They liked the insights, but they needed the insights to move.
One advisor said exactly what we were hearing across the board:
“I want to let the numbers dance.”
V1 had three structural limitations:
The flow was too linear. Real advisory relationships are not annual cycles.
Insights were static. Changing a scenario meant regenerating the entire report.
Advisors think in evolving narratives. Every new detail changes the rest of the story.
The product needed a different mental model. With the founder and CPO, I helped turn that insight into a new system architecture and interaction model.
V2: Designing a System That Thinks With the Advisor
I led the design direction for the four dynamic dashboards that replaced the static report: Business Valuation, Wealth & Retirement, Succession & Exit, and Risk Management
These dashboards updated in real-time as data changed, turning RISR into a conversation engine. Advisors could now explore scenarios like:
“What changes if you exit at 55 years-old vs 65?”
“Here’s how your retirement income shifts with valuation.”
“If you want your dream valuation by 2030, here’s what needs to happen.”
This deepened advisor–client conversations, increased trust, created stronger planning cycles, and unlocked enterprise adoption.
Succession & Exit became a flagship feature. Before RISR, no one offered a real succession planning tool.
Designing a lightweight real-time workflow
Full real-time recalculation across the entire system would have slowed our roadmap, so we created a fast, simple edit loop:
Edit: jump straight to the inputs driving the current insight
Adjust: update scenarios without re-running the full review flow
Return: land back on the dashboard with refreshed outputs
This turned every client profile from a static annual report into a living, dynamic system advisors could explore in real conversations without disrupting technical velocity.
Designing for scale and enterprise trust
I took a fast but principled approach to the design system, starting with foundational primitives and layering in complexity as real patterns emerged across screens. I led the system architecture and core components while shaping states, patterns, and extensibility around actual product needs. This created a consistent foundation across dashboards, workflows, and PDFs.
I also contributed directly to front end implementation in React with TypeScript and Tailwind, working closely with engineering to ensure high fidelity execution. This improved velocity, reduced handoff friction, and raised implementation quality across the system.
Outcomes that moved the needle
V2 elevated RISR from a tool to a workflow to a system of record for business-owner planning.
Working with the founder and CPO, I helped redefine the product model to reflect how advisors actually think: iteratively, narratively, and client-first.
Business Impact:
$1M ARR in 18 months
Rapid enterprise pipeline acceleration
Advisors using RISR more frequently and more confidently
Succession & Exit became the new flagship feature
RISR became part of the playbook for firm-level planning
Improved advisor-client trust cycles
But the most important outcome wasn’t a metric, it was the shift in how advisors talked to their clients.
RISR didn’t digitize the relationship. It deepened it.
Takeaways and what I can bring to Loyalist
Loyalist is tackling something rare: unifying fragmented data across reservations, POS, events, and social into a real-time guest intelligence layer. Having designed systems that synthesize multi-source data at RISR (AI tax docs, accounting sync, manual inputs), I understand the design challenges:
How do you surface insights without overwhelming operators during service?
How do you handle data conflicts across systems?
How do you build trust when the data is incomplete or inconsistent?
How do you design for both the quick look and the deep dive?
At Studio Bumi, I learned how service actually works: what information matters in the moment, what can wait, and how to design for chaos without creating more chaos. While we're doing pop-ups, I've gotten to understand the pressure, timing, and coordination that makes or breaks a service.
I'd bring that combination to Loyalist: systems thinking that respects operational reality
Studio Bumi
Designing hospitality from the inside out
Studio Bumi is the food experience studio I’ve helped build since moving to New York. We host pop-ups and collaborative events across NYC restaurants, where I design the menu, cook alongside the team, and orchestrate the full flow of service from prep to plate to guest experience.
Working inside real dining rooms has shaped how I think about product more than anything else. I learned quickly what hospitality actually means: anticipation, timing, flow, escalation, recovery, the invisible choreography between kitchen,
hosts, and guests. Every dish is a system. Every service is a user journey.
From plating 30-seat multi-course dinners to coordinating the flow between front and back of house, Studio Bumi taught me hospitality at a visceral level. Not as an aesthetic, but as a practice. It is where I learned how small details compound into moments people remember. That is why Loyalist’s mission resonates so strongly with me, because it focuses on designing tools that help restaurants deliver experiences with that same care and intention.
Early Bar Baserri website redesign concept
Translating hospitality into a digital experience
I design and build brand-forward restaurant websites using Framer and custom React components. My focus is translating a restaurant’s identity into a digital experience that feels intentional. I am currently working with the owner of Bar Baserri, Ye’s Apothecary, Red Sorghum, and Blue Willow to update the digital look and feel across the group.
Some words from the founding team I collaborated with from 0 to $1m ARR
(as seen on LinkedIn)
Alex Michaels
CPO at RISR
“Richard was a user-centric beacon within our product and design function. He maintains ultimate curiosity about the user and their needs while maintaining a clear understanding of business and product strategy. He's a strong technical designer and a proactive communicator with both product and engineering teams.
Jason Early
Founder & CEO at RISR
“Richard is an exceptional designer and a brilliant thinker. His understanding of the business needs coupled with design principles makes him a rarity in his field and we are lucky to work with him.”
Thanks, for reading!
Thank you for spending time with this. Hospitality and food have shaped who I am whether it’s through cooking, through community, or through design. Loyalist is one of the rare places where all of that feels aligned.
If what I’ve shared sparks something, I’d love to meet, learn about your vision firsthand, and explore where I can contribute.
(but also keep scrolling for the best part)
BONUS
