One person.Strategy, design,and code.

I’m Radu. I run Digital Upstream as a one-person practice for founders who are past the bootstrap stage and want considered work — not a template, not a page-builder output.

For the last decade I’ve sat on both sides of the design–engineering line: long enough in product design to know what a good brief looks like, long enough in engineering to know what a design actually costs to ship. The studios that put strategy, design, and build in different rooms tend to lose something in the hallway between them.

My job is to make the second draft of your product feel inevitable.

How I work

I take on one engagement at a time. Three to twelve weeks, depending on the scope. We start with a long conversation — usually a video call followed by a written exchange — and we don’t move on from it until we both know what the work is supposed to do. Then I draft, you respond, I revise, and the artefact slowly becomes the real thing in front of us.

I do not subcontract. I do not have a project manager. The person you send your half-formed Loom video to is the same person designing the system, writing the migrations, and pushing the production build.

What I’m interested in

SaaS for technical operators. AI products that earn the prefix. Consumer apps with real edges — a clear point of view rather than a thin layer over an LLM call. Brand work that is durable enough to outlive the launch press cycle.

I am not the right person for: e-commerce migrations, agency-of-record retainers, or anyone hoping to be talked into starting a startup. I’ll happily refer you to people who are.

The honest part

I’m one person. I read every message, and I write back. I keep my schedule visible on the home page — if it says Open for Q3 2026, there are seats. If it says full, it’s full, and I won’t pretend otherwise.