about & careers

The best way to get to know us is by
diving into how we're building our team
and what we stand for.

👋 Hey, it's Jim here, founder at Love At First Try! I am really excited that you're considering working with us and can't wait to read more about you through your application.

Jim Zarkadas

Founder and Lead Designer

Why I started Love At First Try

A video message I sent to one of our design candidates

We’re looking for product designers who think like business owners and strive for world-class quality.

Who you are (requirements)

Until now, I (Jim) have led all product-related designs myself, but I’m now hiring our first Design Lead to step into that role and take over some of our new clients. Someone who loves thinking like a founder, leading client relationships, and driving real outcomes - not just delivering UI.

  • Senior Product Designer with at least 4 years of experience in product design (Comfortable in both UI, UX and product strategy)

  • Agency or SaaS in-house experience

  • CRO knowledge and strategic thinking - you design for growth and delight - you're not just focused on design system or components and you forget about the business goals. You design like a strategist that wants to make companies grow and make progress.

  • Product thinker and focused on shipping - you care more about shipping and less about perfecting your designs from the v1. You focus on making progress and iterating on the go and not holding the team back. This doesn't mean you ship crappy designs and you don't care about quality. It means you love staying lean and moving fast. You avoid perfectionism and you focus on progress and incremental improvements.

  • You love autonomy and client interaction

  • Hungry to grow into a leadership role

Where you might be coming from:

  • Senior/Lead Product Designer in a SaaS startup

  • Design Manager who wants less meetings, more impact

  • Freelancer who is tired of selling and want stability + vision

  • Freelancer that want's to build their own products and want to do freelancing to work closely with founders, learn about entrepreunership and make enough income to invest in their ideas

A week of working in our team (what you'll be working on)

  • You'll lead the product design for 1 or 2 (depending on how many hours you'll work with us) of our SaaS clients and you'll be the right hand of the CEO and CTO in these companies

  • You'll design new features and growth improvements for them (some example clients of us are https://www.knowledgeowl.com/ and https://zenmaid.com/)

  • You'll lead your design projects and you'll do everything from UX research to UI and growth design and you'll operate like a design lead for these. You'll be focused on creating scoped releases that the dev teams can use to move fast and ship as fast as possible.

  • You'll lead your micro design team that will consist of you, an illustrator and a motion design (see more details below)

  • Jim will be your lead and you'll review your design with him (daily) with Loom videos and he will help you make progress and get unblocked. Jim is here to help you become the best designer possible with training, coaching and more.

What we're offering (aka why you should work with us)

  • World-class training to make you one of the best in the world - many companies offer training but what they offer is just a budget to buy some books. We believe this is superficial. What we're offering is world-class mentors that you'll have on your side to train you and answer questions you have. You'll have your own PLG CRO mentor and also a Brand strategy (creative direction) mentor that will train you monthly and help you upskill yourself on how to help our SaaS clients grow and also feel better and more branded. Our goal as a team is be top 5% design talent in the world and training is a big part of our culture and strategy.

  • You'll have your own illustrator and motion designer to empower you to create world-class quality designs. They will complement your skills and take care of the illustrations and all the animations you want to incorporate into your UI. We design for growth and delight and we don't expect a product designer to do everything. You'll own the design strategy, UX and UI and your design team will take care of making it beautiful and delightful.

  • World-class level of compensation and flexibility. You can work either part-time for 4h per day or less or full time for 8h per day - what we're looking for is talented passionate designers that want to be in the top 5% best designers of the world and we don't care if you have other projects or if you're building your own products. We actually love designer that are entrepreneurial and we embrace this mindset of having side-projects.

  • You'll be working remotely and you can work from wherever you want - do keep in mind that you'll have to show up daily in Slack and review designs daily with Jim - we are async in general but it's important to communicate daily via Slack and keep a strong efficient pace where we can move and iterate fast.

  • You'll be praised when you're entrepreneurial on the side and not criticised or even blocked - If you want to build your own products and learn more about entrepreneurship we're the best environment for you - we strongly believe in working with designers that have ambition, a strong vision and want to become entrepreneurs themselves. The reason our clients hire us is because we design like entrepreneurs and not like Figma design geeks.
    We care about design quality and craft but what we care most is to help our SaaS clients make progress and grow and make their users happy. We use design as a tool to empower their users and create value for them. Design is the medium for us not the goal. That's why we love it if you have a side project you want to build while working full or part time with us. Because these side projects in the end will make you a better strategist and will make you a better designer for our clients. Also our mission as a company is to make every designer that joins us better and more successful. Not to lock them and ask them to quit everything else they're doing and devote themselves fully to us. We embrace creativity, freedom and independence.

  • Enough variety to not get bored but lots of depth to have impact too. We've worked with big companies and we know how it feels to be focused on a small domain of a big product for a whole year. It's boring as hell. We've also worked with agencies that work one 1 month projects where there is zero impact and all you create is some nice screens that many times get forgotten somewhere or butchered while going to production. We're different. We work with small SaaS product teams of 5 to 20 people and we work with them for multiple years. This way you trully lead and own their SaaS and design everything in it and you also make sure what goes in production has real impact to your users. On top of this you lead more than 1 SaaS teams which makes it more creative and you get exposed to different industries and teams.

Our mindset

Our clients don’t pay us for deliverables.
They pay for clarity under chaos, faster decisions, and a sharper mind than theirs.
If our team isn’t growing 10x personally,
Our studio will never grow 10x financially.
We’re not selling services.
We’re selling transformation, starting with ourselves.
That's why we've gone all-in on our personal growth with in-house sophisticated training systems.

We're on a journey to build one of the top 5 product design studios in the world for bootstrapped PLG SaaS navigating the growth stage (from $1M to $10M ARR)

We also believe the traditional agency model is broken.
So we built something new.

The revenue model (aka how you make money) impacts the quality of your work.

Many agencies make money by:

  • Charging high - they charge senior-level rates.

  • Paying low - they use junior designers behind the scenes or underpay designers.

  • Delivering as fast as possible - they focus on speed and minimize the time spent on each project to increase their profit margin.

This model is toxic for both clients and designers. It's like a design factory with zero design research and thought.

That's why I built Love at First Try, a design agency with a completely different revenue model. We have two revenue streams.

  • Services - Each team works with only 3 clients per year. By focusing on only 3 clients in a year, we’re able to dive deep into their businesses. This allows us to create designs that don’t just look good but improve user experience and drive revenue. We don't do short-term projects.

  • Products - We package our research, designs and knowledge into educational products that can be sold to and help thousands of SaaS teams. Instead of building an army of designers, we scale our revenue by selling products and by focusing on specialization and deep knowledge generation.

This model allows us to have high revenue without sacrificing quality.

The only way to scale our revenue is to deliver exceptional designs for clients because we then will sell proven methodologies and design patterns that drive real results for SaaS companies.

Simply put, we only succeed when our clients succeed. And that’s what sets us apart from other agencies. We don't sell hours. We sell results.

- Jim Zarkadas

Send us your application

Below you can find some first questions that I want to ask you before we jump in any kind of interview. These questions will help me understand better where you are in your career journey and how Love At First Try can empower you to go the next step and grow as a designer.


Looking forward to hearing from you!

Our team

Jim is the lead product designer and design growth strategist. He makes sure your users will find your product easy to use and that they will convert.

Ioanna is the brand designer. She makes sure our product and website illustrations and visuals, look unique and beautiful.

Mo is the motion designer. He makes sure your product stands out from the crowd and has a delightful experience with beautiful micro-animations and interactions.

Ana is the growth reporting and research assistant. She is the one that drafts every month PLG growth reports to measure and review our progress all together, and she also creates knowledge bases with insights from your customers that we can use in our product strategy and design.

Some of the SaaS teams that
trusted us so far

$1.8M+ of annual recurring revenue

CRM and appointment SaaS for cleaning business in US and UK.

$1M+ of annual recurring revenue

Knowledge Base software for product and support teams in tech companies.

Used by 64.468+ businesses in The Netherlands

Biggest and most popular online company incorporation service in The Netherlands.l

Used by billion-dollar enterprises and making $2M+ of ARR

Enterprise video hosting platform that makes corporate comms simple and secure.

Used by Facebook, Microsoft, Intel and other top tech brand.

Slashdata is the leading analyst firm in the developer economy, tracking global software developer trends via the largest, most comprehensive developer surveys worldwide

Used by teams in Amazon, Booking, Sony and more.

Create and send stylish e-scard filled with messages, GIFs, photos & videos.

Used by 1,000+ companies like HubSpot, AirBnB, Amazon and Facebook

Turns any website into data with undetected scraping technology.

$1M+ generated in mentorships per year

A marketplace of trusted source to find highly-vetted mentors & industry professionals to move your tech career ahead.

Most popular indie SaaS community in UK with $10k+ of MRR

The #1 founder community supporting you to ramen profitable, and beyond. An active Slack, remote co-working, expert AMAs, in-house mentors, masterminds, discounts and much more.

$500K+ of ARR with $8M of seed funding

A SaaS that helps real-estate lenders protect their collateral.

Backed by the founders of WeTransfer, JustEat, and TreatWell.

Centralized governance tasks and communication for Venture Capital firms.

Used by 1M+ businesses in 190+ countries

Automate DM conversations in Instagram, Messenger & SMS.

Used by 100.000+ businesses in The Netherlands.

EU-based contract management and e-signing tool for SMBs

Trusted by marketing teams in Freshbooks, Drift and more.

Link building and local search solutions for SEOs and Agencies.

Used by thousands of students in US

Mappd is a B2C SaaS that provides students with the roadmap to help them navigate their premed journey. From the people who brought the Medical School Headquarters.

Mid-stage niche SaaS for moving companies

Oncue is a full-service moving company operating system that helps moving companies grow with innovative technology and an on-demand booking service.

Used by teams like Paddle and UserZoom

Sales Enablement platform with the high adoption and low cost of maintenance.

Podcast for non-designers

Learn what makes SaaS products sticky and unforgettable. 

© 2025 Love At First Try B.V. - All rights reserved.

🇳🇱 Founded in The Netherlands

Podcast for non-designers

Learn what makes SaaS products sticky and unforgettable. 

© 2025 Love At First Try B.V. - All rights reserved.

🇳🇱 Founded in The Netherlands