Building Deep Work Studio (The Long Read)

Note: This article was written by Claude Research with small edits by me. The original prompt was:

Research Deep Work Studio's history, clients, and methodologies to create a comprehensive founder case study demonstrating Charlie Ellington's experience scaling a remote design agency from 2 founders to 30+ designers.

Charlie Ellington co-founded and scaled Deep Work Studio from a two-person partnership in late 2018 to a distributed network of 38+ expert designers, completing 50+ projects for major web3 clients including the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, and Fortune 500 companies. The studio pioneered remote design sprints before COVID-19, developed the "Hypersprint" methodology combining deep work principles with Google Ventures Design Sprints, and achieved exceptional velocity—scaling from two founders to a thriving collective of 38+ designers while maintaining a sustainable 4-hour daily work schedule and delivering work for the world's leading web3 organizations.

The founding story and market opportunity

Charlie met his co-founder Andrej Berlin at DevCon 2018 in Prague, Ethereum's annual developers conference, after spending two years as a solo freelance designer specializing in blockchain interfaces. Andrej brought experience running over 100 design sprints with companies like Lego, N26, and Axa, plus expertise in remote collaboration methodologies developed with Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. Charlie contributed his "superpower"—three years of implementing Cal Newport's Deep Work principles, which he describes as working in "a state of distraction-free concentration that pushes cognitive capabilities to their limit."

Charlie identified a critical gap: the rapidly growing Ethereum and web3 ecosystem desperately needed UX expertise but lacked designers who understood blockchain technology. Looking for a business partner to scale up what he was offering as a freelancer, Charlie's vision was to invest in web3 teams through service offerings. This first-mover advantage in an emerging industry became the foundation for a highly profitable agency that would operate successfully from 2019 through 2023.

The founding partnership brought complementary skills that proved essential for scaling. Charlie brought blockchain design expertise and deep work methodology, while Andrej contributed structured design sprint facilitation and remote team coordination systems. Their shared insight: traditional agency models wasted cognitive capacity through context switching, extended timelines, and unfocused collaboration. They envisioned something radically different.

Hypersprint methodology and rapid delivery innovation

Deep Work Studio's signature achievement was creating the "Hypersprint" methodology—a six-day design sprint process optimized for cognitive performance and remote collaboration. This represented genuine innovation in service delivery, backed by neuroscience principles and validated through repetition.

The process structure deliberately defied industry norms. Instead of traditional eight-hour workdays, the team worked only four hours of deep work daily, achieving better results than agencies working twice as long. Charlie's analysis revealed the counterintuitive truth: "Like a muscle, Deep Work can only do some many repetitions before exhaustion. After four hours of focused design, the results of pushing pixels and my speed exponentially decreases."

The six-day sprint broke down systematically: Day 1 focused on defining goals and challenges (4 hours), Day 2 on research and generating solutions (3 hours), Day 3 on merging solutions into storyboards (3 hours), Days 4-5 on prototype creation (4 hours each), and Day 6 on user testing with five target users (4 hours). Every session was time-boxed, distraction-free, and conducted remotely via Zoom and Miro.

Early versions of the process used four-day intensive sprints, but Charlie discovered they needed four-day recovery periods afterward before maintaining quality. By extending to six days with shorter daily sessions, they eliminated burnout while improving output. "We now work in six day sprints at four hours a day. The results have improved, I exercise everyday, I can do a sprint back to back. Overall I love my work more than ever."

This innovation had significant business implications. Charlie calculated that while a $24,000 six-day sprint appeared expensive at $2,000 per person per day, clients actually paid only $348 per team member per actual deep work day—far below market rates for equivalent expertise. The value proposition was clear: clients received 80% of the value in 20% of the time compared to traditional engagements.

Scaling from two founders to 38+ distributed experts

The studio's growth trajectory demonstrated Charlie's ability to build and manage distributed teams at scale. Starting with just Charlie and Andrej in late 2018, they completed 30 design sprints in the first eight months, an extraordinary pace that forced rapid systems development.

These deep work four-hour days were critical to scaling. Instead of asking "how do we get people to join?", Charlie and Andrej asked "how do we create the perfect working environment for ourselves?" Then other people wanted to join. This became their competitive edge: they created amazing working conditions through creativity, interesting and challenging clients and design problems in the novel web3 space, a community of peers, and a mentoring scheme to train others in their craft. This combination meant that once people did one project with Deep Work, they were easily convinced to do the next. The studio could scale as a team of freelancers and remove risk through not paying salaries and having fixed costs.

By 2021, Deep Work operated with 38+ design experts globally under a novel organizational model—no payroll, no formal hiring, no centralized HR department. Instead, they built a cooperative structure based on reputation, peer recommendations, and mentor-mentee relationships. Charlie developed comprehensive skill trees that mapped progression paths, allowing designers at any level to join and upskill while earning.

The team composition included Creative Directors, Product Designers, UX Researchers, Workshop Facilitators, Brand Designers, User Testing Recruiters, and specialized roles. Experts worked as autonomous freelancers, choosing which projects aligned with their interests while adhering to strict quality standards once committed. This required sophisticated coordination systems.

The operational model was remarkably lean: fixed monthly costs of about €500, mainly for SaaS software that helped support the studio. No offices, no permanent employees. Everyone was paid on their exact commitment and then the team decided how to reinvest profits in the collective. This risk-free strategy meant they could compete and scale up/down based on demand, then reinvest profits into building their own software, team meetups and a better collective environment.

Charlie and Andrej built proprietary software to manage this complexity. Deep Teams handled decentralized project management and payments, tracking individual contributions and enabling transparent profit distribution. Deep Skills mapped expertise across the collective, managed project completion, and facilitated peer reviews. These custom platforms became essential infrastructure for coordinating dozens of freelancers across multiple time zones without traditional management overhead.

However, on critical review, these software projects were often vanity projects and were not critical for Deep Work's success. The team overfocused on building management tools for scale without solving the top of the funnel: repeat revenue, repeat clients, or a systematic funnel to bring in new clients. They relied on word of mouth and reputation. Then as the web3 industry matured, companies started hiring in-house teams, and the market crashed in 2022—Deep Work found itself without a sustainable pipeline.

The quality assurance system relied on process rigor rather than hierarchical oversight. Every project followed documented workflows with minimal variation, ensuring each sprint was better than the previous one through systematic learning. Workshop facilitators followed detailed scripts covering everything from introduction timing (15 minutes) to "How Might We" exercises (48 minutes) to storyboard creation (multiple time-boxed sessions). Creative Directors held full responsibility for project success, coordinating teams via Discord channels, managing budgets, and ensuring value delivered exceeded client expectations.

The mentoring and expert systems were critical to scaling and guaranteeing consistently high quality. Deep Work implemented a Collaborator/Expert system: to qualify as an Expert and work client-facing, designers first attested their skills as Collaborators. The Expert and Collaborator could split payments and tasks—meaning Experts got support while others could upskill and learn design skills. This collaboration system was brilliant for talent development, though in retrospect the software built to manage it may have been over-engineered.

Notable clients and high-impact projects

Deep Work's portfolio demonstrated capability across complex technical products and major organizations. The studio completed over 50 projects, with particularly impressive work for the Ethereum ecosystem and enterprise clients.

Ethereum Foundation: ETH 2.0 Validator Launchpad

The most significant project involved designing the official launchpad interface for Ethereum 2.0 validators—critical infrastructure enabling the blockchain's transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake. Charlie led product design while Andrej facilitated workshops with the Ethereum Foundation team.

Delivered in just three weeks (one week for the launchpad, two weeks for public identity/branding work), the project tackled extraordinary complexity: educating non-technical users about key management, staking economics, and validator operations while maintaining security standards. The team ran collaborative workshops via Zoom and Miro, involving diverse contributors from across the Ethereum ecosystem.

The launchpad successfully launched on mainnet and became the primary entry point for thousands of validators. The Ethereum Foundation publicly acknowledged: "Special thanks to both Consensys and DeepWork Studio 💙. The idea behind the launchpad is to make the process of becoming an eth2 validator as easy as possible, without compromising on security and education."

Ramp Instant: Crypto Onboarding with Minimal Client Time

For Ramp Network, Charlie pioneered the "User Experience Sprint"—an adapted process requiring only three hours of client time across six days. This showcased Deep Work's efficiency optimization for technical teams with limited bandwidth.

The process ran: Day 1 creating initial prototypes (zero client time), Day 2 conducting first-round user testing (zero client time), Day 3 running a three-hour collaboration session to prioritize feedback, Day 4 building high-fidelity prototypes (zero client time), Day 5 conducting second-round testing (zero client time), and Day 6 delivering reports and implementation specifications (zero client time).

Charlie noted in the case study: "Ramp were able to spend only 3 hours on a call with us while spending more time to work on smart contract development... The team knew what to build in a very short amount of time with only three hours of collaboration." This demonstrated ability to work effectively with deeply technical teams focused on core development while still delivering validated UX direction.

Additional Major Clients

The client list demonstrated versatility across both web3 startups and traditional enterprises: ConsenSys (major blockchain infrastructure company), dYdX (decentralized exchange), Uniswap (DeFi protocol), Centrifuge (asset financing), Molecule (pharmaceutical research), Pillar (crypto wallet), Nexus Mutual (insurance), MakerDAO, Maple, Spark, Obol, Stakehouse, and many others you can see on the Deep Work Case Study page.

Remote collaboration mastery and distributed team management

Charlie championed remote work before COVID-19 made it mainstream. His January 2020 article noted: "this article was originally posted in January before remote work was truly the thing/norm. At the time we already wrote that remote sprints were a more effective, faster, better for the environment and enjoyable process. But the argument of being in an office was still strong. Now that's been debunked."

He identified four key advantages that proved prescient: intensity breeds focus through video calls and online whiteboards where "everyone remains focused on the task," speed from eliminating physical movement and post-it management, environmental benefits from no global travel, and global talent access enabling the world's best designers to collaborate regardless of location.

The remote methodology centered on eliminating context switching, which Charlie called "the biggest waste I've ever experienced in agencies and companies." Deep Work's solution: work only in pairs with one client at a time. "When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task." By maintaining single-threaded focus, the team achieved cognitive efficiency impossible in traditional multi-client environments.

The tool stack was carefully chosen: Zoom for video collaboration with recording capabilities, Miro for collaborative brainstorming using extensive templates, Figma and Sketch for design prototyping, Discord for team coordination, and custom platforms (Deep Teams and Deep Skills) for project management and skill tracking. Even details mattered—Charlie noted they used music "to take away any awkward silences" during focused individual work on video calls.

Managing 38+ freelancers across time zones required systematic coordination. Every project started with comprehensive onboarding ensuring clients understood expectations, tools, and participation requirements. Projects only confirmed to the team after upfront payment, protecting freelancer availability. Schedule adherence was mandatory policy—changes during projects typically resulted in delays, cost increases, or cancellation.

Creative Directors held full project responsibility, managing budgets, coordinating specialists, handling scope changes, and ensuring deliverable quality. When issues arose, the priority hierarchy was explicit: exceed client expectations first, maintain team wellbeing second. Additional scope was calculated at 2.25x cost, creating clear financial boundaries while remaining flexible.

Working with technical and developer-heavy teams

Deep Work's methodology proved particularly effective for engineering-focused organizations, a capability directly relevant to Charlie's current positioning at Zebra Design. The studio's approach embedded technical experts directly in design decisions rather than treating them as implementers of specifications.

Charlie articulated the core problem facing blockchain teams: "Blockchain development takes longer than Web2 product iteration cycles. This means teams don't know if they're building something users want until after a costly and time consuming #buidl." Smart contract development required months or years of perfect code before mainnet launches—one bug could lose user funds. Design sprints solved this by validating products with real users before writing any code, cutting development expenses exponentially.

The workshop structure facilitated creative exchange between technical experts and designers. Rather than designers "scratching the surface during research, designing something without technical knowledge and getting stuck in endless feedback loops," engineers participated in sketching exercises, user journey mapping, and prototype concept creation. This collaborative approach meant technical feasibility discussions happened during concept phase, not after expensive design work was complete.

Charlie advocated pragmatic approaches for technical teams under pressure. His "Minimal Decentralized Products" framework (September 2019) argued against over-engineering: "Don't decentralize the entire product at once. Build the crucial parts, release and iterate until you've build something users want. Then decentralize the rest." This philosophy resonated with developer teams who needed to ship value quickly while maintaining long-term vision.

The sprint format respected engineering time constraints. The Ramp project's three-hour client commitment demonstrated this explicitly—the team could focus on smart contract development while Deep Work handled UX validation in parallel. This efficiency made design sprints attractive to technical founders who viewed design consultation as necessary but time-consuming.

Productization strategy and business model evolution

Charlie's journey demonstrated sophisticated thinking about service productization—transforming open-ended consulting into repeatable, scalable offerings with predictable outcomes and pricing.

Phase 1: Custom Design Sprints (2019) started with adapted GV Design Sprints for blockchain teams, with variable engagement based on client needs. This proved the concept but lacked efficiency.

Phase 2: User Experience Sprint (2019) emerged from the Ramp project, creating a specialized variant requiring minimal client time. This showed early productization thinking—identifying a specific use case and optimizing the process for it.

Phase 3: Hypersprint Rebrand (2020) marked full productization. Charlie wrote: "we now call Deep Work Sprints, THE HYPERSPRINT... Hypersprints give you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and user reactions." The service became a defined product with fixed structure, deliverables, and pricing.

Phase 4: Service Portfolio Expansion (2020-2021) added complementary offerings: Prototype Sprint (core design sprint), Implementation Ready Sprint (production specifications), Brand & Visual Identity, User Testing Sessions (standalone testing), Consultancy (strategic advisory), Website Sprint Workshops, and Iteration Workshops. Each had defined scope, timeline, and deliverables. Budget calculators enabled custom team configurations while maintaining pricing consistency.

Phase 5: Exit to Community via Token (December 2021) represented the most ambitious evolution. Charlie launched the DEEP token (ERC-20, 100,000 supply) for governance over USDC treasury and collective decisions. Team members earned tokens based on project work, creating ownership alignment. "Our plan at Deep Work has always been to scale and decentralise to a community of designers. Making sure that everyone who contributed to value creation gets a share of it."

The business model emphasized upfront payment (projects only confirmed after payment), strict scope boundaries (additional work at 2.25x cost), and transparent profit distribution. Monthly revenue was tracked publicly, with profit bonus schemes and multi-signature treasury management. This transparency built trust within the distributed team while maintaining financial discipline.

Accelerated learning and skill development systems

Charlie developed a compelling theory about rapid skill acquisition through feedback loops that has direct implications for how quickly designers can improve. His insight: "My theory is I've gained the same amount of experience that takes a typically design contractor ten years. A standard contractor works on 2–3 long term projects a year. It's not until the end of a project they get to properly retrospect."

By completing 30 sprints in eight months, Charlie compressed ten years of learning into less than one year. Each sprint provided user feedback, team retrospectives, and process improvements—30 feedback cycles versus a traditional contractor's three per year. He cited Cal Newport's neuroscience research: "By focusing intensely on a specific skill, you're forcing the specific relevant circuit to fire, again and again, in isolation. This repetitive use of a specific circuit triggers cells called oligodendrocytes to begin wrapping layers of myelin around the neurons in the circuits—effectively cementing the skill."

The practical result was dramatic: "My visual design has become on leaps and bounds in the period of eight months. What used to take me working through the weekend to make sure we had something of high quality, can now be done in a day." This acceleration came from deliberate practice at scale—not just doing more work, but creating systematic feedback loops after every project.

Deep Work institutionalized this learning system through skill trees, mentor-mentee relationships, and public documentation. Designers at any level could join as "Collaborators," learn from "Experts" with deep domain knowledge, progress to "Leads" responsible for task completion, and eventually become "Experts" or "Creative Directors" with full project responsibility. The system explicitly supported learning while earning, unusual in competitive design markets.

Post-project retrospectives were mandatory, with anonymous client feedback via Typeform and peer reviews through Deep Skills. Every workflow was documented granularly, with updates tracked by date. This created organizational memory—each project's lessons were captured and applied to subsequent work, ensuring "each new client getting a significantly improved process."

The studio productized everything and systematically documented all processes in their comprehensive GitBook documentation. This meant every workshop, sprint format, onboarding procedure, and quality assurance step was templated and refined over time. The documentation became a knowledge base that enabled consistent delivery across the distributed team and allowed new members to quickly understand the methodology. This systematic approach to capturing and sharing knowledge was a key competitive advantage, ensuring quality didn't depend on individual expertise but on proven, repeatable processes.

Health-first culture and sustainable pace

Charlie's commitment to prioritizing wellbeing over output represented both a philosophical stance and a competitive advantage. His motivation was explicit: "to do more meaningful work in less time. Using the spare time to increase my health and happiness." His personal interests in kitesurfing, hiking, and paddle-boarding drove the decision to work less while delivering higher value.

The four-hour daily deep work limit was enforced rigorously. Charlie found that working four hours at peak cognitive performance delivered superior results to eight hours of mediocre output: "Clients get four hours of us at our peak, rather than a freelancer at eight hours of mediocre." This wasn't just theory—the pricing analysis proved it economically viable.

The studio culture emphasized "health first" principles: mental and physical wellbeing prioritized before work, daily exercise expectations, and viewing work as an "integral part of meaningful life" rather than separate from it. Charlie reflected: "Internally we [prioritize] our health first. Before work we prioritise mental wellbeing and exercise... Only five hours a day (although exceptionally more results than eight) means we have more time for personal pursuits and exercise. Meaning we're happy. Side effects include increased productivity and creativity."

This approach proved sustainable at scale. While early intensive four-day sprints required four-day recovery, the evolved six-day format with four-hour sessions allowed running sprints back-to-back without burnout. The team could maintain quality delivery consistently, an enormous advantage over agencies cycling between intense crunch periods and exhausted lulls.

For distributed team management, this philosophy created retention benefits. Freelance experts chose projects aligned with intrinsic motivation rather than purely financial compensation. The culture attracted designers who valued autonomy, meaningful work, and sustainable pace—creating a self-selecting community of aligned talent.

Web3 boom period and blockchain specialization

Charlie positioned Deep Work perfectly for the 2019-2021 blockchain boom, building on his pre-founding year of blockchain interface design and Andrej's DevCon network. The client list reads like a who's who of the DeFi and Web3 ecosystem during its explosive growth: Hummingbot, dYdX, Uniswap, Ramp, Centrifuge (DeFi), ConsenSys and Ethereum Foundation (infrastructure), Pillar (wallets), Molecule (pharmaceutical research), SportX (sports betting), and Nexus Mutual (insurance).

Charlie articulated the opportunity clearly in 2019: "Blockchain has a UX problem and Fintech is winning the war. Dapp user numbers are in the thousands... We're a long way from the killer app. We've moved on from Crypto-Kittie hype and we need something big. I'm convinced we're on what's know as a 'user interface moment'—the point where some great user facing solutions will be built on top of established protocols."

This insight proved prescient. Deep Work's specialization in blockchain UX during the industry's formative years created competitive moats: understanding of smart contract constraints, familiarity with decentralized finance mechanics, knowledge of key management challenges, and credibility within the web3 community. The studio could speak the technical language of blockchain developers while advocating for user needs, bridging a gap few designers could fill.

The work also demonstrated adaptability to emerging technologies. From early ICO-era projects through the 2020-2021 DeFi summer to NFTs and DAOs, Deep Work evolved alongside the ecosystem. Charlie's September 2019 "Minimal Decentralized Products" framework showed sophisticated understanding of blockchain development tradeoffs, advising pragmatic iteration rather than perfect decentralization: "It's a stark choice between launching and iterating until we have a billion decentralized users. In the meanwhile, the incumbents will win."

The web3 positioning also influenced organizational structure. Deep Work operated as a "web3-native" company with DEEP governance tokens, multi-signature treasury management, Snapshot voting for proposals, and compensation via Ethereum mainnet addresses. This made the studio a living example of decentralized organization, building credibility with web3 clients who valued alignment with ecosystem principles.

Metrics, achievements, and credibility markers

The quantifiable results demonstrated exceptional performance across multiple dimensions:

Velocity Metrics:

  • 50+ total projects completed across studio lifetime
  • 12-day average turnaround per project from kickoff to delivery
  • 1-3 week timeline for complex projects like Ethereum Foundation work

Team Scale:

  • Grew from 2 founders to 38+ expert designers across 4+ years
  • 40+ intrinsically motivated experts provided paid work over studio lifetime
  • Managed fully distributed team across multiple time zones globally
  • Zero traditional employees—100% freelance/contractor model

Efficiency Gains:

  • 4 hours deep work daily vs. 8+ hours traditional agencies
  • Client time reduced to as little as 3 hours on 6-day projects (Ramp example)
  • 80% of value delivered in 20% of time compared to traditional engagements

Client Prestige:

Financial Performance:

  • "Very profitable" operation 2019-2023 with revenues hitting a maximum of ~$800,000 annual at peak
  • During the peak web3 cycle we introduced Uber style surge pricing to keep up with demand
  • Sustainable profit distribution to 38+ freelancers

Infrastructure Built:

Quality Indicators:

  • User testing with 5+ participants on every project
  • Public client acknowledgments (Ethereum Foundation specifically thanked Deep Work)
  • Ethereum launchpad continues as primary entry point for validators
  • Zero NDA requirement due to portfolio-based reputation building

The transition and lessons learned

Charlie left Deep Work in 2023 to escape co-founder stress, as the market shifted from agency services to in-house hiring. Rather than viewing this as failure, the timeline reveals natural evolution: the agency model that proved "very profitable" from 2019-2023 had achieved its purpose as the web3 industry matured and companies built internal capabilities.

Andrej's September 2025 resignation post framed the journey positively: the original mission of filling a critical UX gap in the Ethereum ecosystem succeeded completely. The studio provided meaningful paid work to over 40 experts with "awesome" working conditions, built valuable proprietary software, created comprehensive knowledge bases, and established lasting community connections.

The business transitioned from centralized agency to "collective of creative experts in web3" rather than shutting down.

Key lessons Charlie carried forward: Structure paradoxically enables freedom—strict processes and time-boxing created more creative output than open-ended exploration. Cognitive performance optimization (4-hour deep work limits, recovery periods) enabled sustainable high performance. Productizing processes with repeatable frameworks scaled more effectively than custom consulting. Pre-COVID remote collaboration mastery yielded competitive advantages. Community ownership through tokens drove engagement and retention. Embedding engineers in design decisions beat specification handoffs. Rapid feedback loops (30 projects in 8 months) accelerated learning 10x. Health-first culture proved both economically viable and retention-effective.

Transferable experience to Zebra Design

Charlie's Deep Work journey provides direct evidence for capabilities central to Zebra Design's "UX Rescue for Technical Teams" positioning:

Rapid delivery expertise: The Hypersprint methodology and 6-day turnarounds directly translate to Zebra Design's 2-3 week deployment timelines. Charlie has proven ability to compress traditional month-long projects into days while maintaining quality.

Working with technical teams: Deep Work's blockchain clients were inherently developer-heavy, requiring understanding of smart contracts, key management, consensus mechanisms, and distributed systems. The collaborative workshop approach that embedded engineers in design decisions maps perfectly to seed-stage technical startups.

Distributed team management: Coordinating 38+ freelancers across time zones demonstrates organizational capability far exceeding requirements for managing design delivery with small technical teams. The systems thinking required to build Deep Teams and Deep Skills platforms shows operational sophistication.

Remote collaboration mastery: Pre-COVID remote work expertise and documented methodologies provide proven frameworks for effective distributed collaboration—essential for working with startups that may have distributed engineering teams.

Process optimization: Charlie's ability to systematize creative work, create repeatable frameworks, and continuously improve through feedback loops translates directly to refining Zebra Design's delivery model over multiple engagements.

Scaling design operations: Building from two founders to 38+ designers while maintaining quality demonstrates capability to grow operations systematically. While Zebra Design may not require this scale immediately, the experience proves Charlie can build infrastructure and processes that enable growth.

Client relationship management: Managing Creative Director responsibilities—client consultation, scope management, expectation setting, budget oversight—shows full business ownership capability relevant to running Zebra Design independently.

Health-first sustainability: The 4-hour deep work model and sustainable pace philosophy enable consistent delivery quality without burnout—critical for solo entrepreneur or small team context.

The Deep Work case study provides compelling evidence that Charlie can deliver what Zebra Design promises: high-quality UX transformations deployed rapidly for technical seed-stage teams, backed by systematic processes proven at scale with notable clients.

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