We were lucky to catch up with Haley Stracher recently and have shared our conversation below.

Haley, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. It’s easy to look at a business or industry as an outsider and assume it’s super profitable – but we’ve seen over and over again in our conversation with folks that most industries have factors that make profitability a challenge. What’s biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?

The biggest challenge for profitability in my industry is user retention, or sometimes called “stickiness”. It’s really hard to make your platform sticky and takes a lot of user testing. You have to solve a pain point for a person really well and make it easy for them to keep doing again and again.

A lot of tech founders have great ideas that they validate, but they either aren’t able to acquire customers easily because of their branding or messaging, or they have problems with retaining current customers because their user experience isn’t good.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

About me:

Hi, I’m Haley! 👋 I’ve helped hundreds of tech founders scale their profit by 6x or more and generate millions from their apps. I’ve worked with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups to find the best solutions for their customers’ problems.

I’m the founder and CEO of Iris Design Collaborative, a UI/UX consultant agency, where we help businesses design their apps and software platforms.

I began in journalism where I worked at large and small newspapers including the Chicago Tribune doing layout design and photography. I loved the storytelling of journalism and had a knack for telling stories in an interesting and visual way. The newspaper industry was struggling to move to digital platforms, so I branched off on my own doing digital design and found UI/UX design.

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What problems I solve:

I work with my clients to tell stories and bring empathy and understanding to our user experiences. Most people don’t read, so we, as an audience, rely heavily on visual cues that are helpful, succinct, and well-timed to guide us through using any app.

Think of how it feels to use some of your favorite apps like Uber, Netflix, AirBnb, etc. The best user experiences are invisible, but the worst are easily seen! So, think of an app that you’ve used that didn’t work well, went slowly, or you had to fill out a bunch of questions and got irritated. That’s the experience we don’t want!

We make it easy, fun, and attainable for users to solve their problems and experience delight inside of an app. We work to reduce the overwhelm that a lot of new platforms face.

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Most proud:

I’m most proud of the amazing team and culture we have here at Iris Design Collaborative. We truly give our clients an amazing experience with us and create some incredible platforms that I’m extremely proud of. We take a lot of time and care to understand their business at a deep level so that we can make impactful art suggestions, and taking that time goes a long way in actually creating something great.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Originally my whole business was everything design (graphics, websites, banners, etc.) — you name it, we did it! I quickly realized that this is a fast way to burn out and it isn’t really scalable either.

That’s when we really dove into UI/UX and used the talent within the team to niche down into tech. We had quite a few tech companies we were working with, so it was an easy transition.

But as a business owner, it’s very hard to say “no” to something you know you and your team are technically pretty qualified to do!

We now do the design work as supplemental materials for clients we’re already working with, and it works much better!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Doing great work! I built my business for 6+ years just based on the work we do and referrals. I didn’t even have a website for the first couple of years. When you treat your clients like partners, it goes a long way.

Some of the feedback I’ve gotten from our clients is that we’re not afraid to push back or share our expertise, and as we’ve grown in the last 6 years, it’s always a really fun conversation when we can brainstorm with the clients together.

It’s truly a collaborative experience, not just within our team but with all of the awesome people we get to work with. Plus people have great ideas — I love chatting about new tech.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.irisdesigncollaborative.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/irisdesigncollab/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haley-s-04b29939/

Image Credits
NOTE: I only uploaded one image for now. We have my team photoshoot in late April, so I will have a lot more awesome photos to share in a few weeks (probably early May)!