In my twenties I spent a lot of time in the back office of audio studios setting up little systems nobody had asked me to set up. Client preference files, so a producer wouldn’t ask a returning customer their format twice. Session templates that saved fifteen minutes of setup. A tracking sheet for repeat clients that eventually became one of the reasons they kept coming back. It wasn’t the job, exactly — it was the ecosystem around the job. I kept getting known for it even though nobody had asked me to build any of it.
Before that, in college, I noticed apartment listings had terrible photography, so I started a side hustle shooting video tours cut to music. Ahead of its time, though I didn’t know that then. And before college, I was in a punk band in high school. Taught myself Photoshop to design our CDs, taught myself enough accounting to track the money in and out, spent a lot of late nights at Kinkos printing album artwork at 2am. Same instinct.
A few years ago I did a UX course at Ironhack in Lisbon. It gave a name and a shape to something I’d been doing by default for most of my adult life. From there I started getting paid for it — redesigning donor flows for public media, optimising signups for mission-based organisations, work I could believe in. Alongside that I kept building tools for the businesses I’m part of. A digital tipping platform for our sailing crew in Saugatuck, because every existing option was broken. A coordination app for family gift-giving, because Christmas group chats are a mess. A consumer-brand website for the schooner, because generic tour-operator templates didn’t reflect any of what the charter actually is. Each one is the same pattern as the audio-studio systems twenty years ago. Something around a specific piece of work that wasn’t working, rebuilt so it works.
The list in my head has been running a long time. At some point the side thing became the thing. What I’d been doing around other people’s businesses started to blur together with the stuff I was doing for my own projects, until it didn’t make sense to keep them separate anymore.
Dommo Labs is mostly a nickname with “labs” on the end. Labs because it’s collaborative and a bit experimental — the work scales up and down depending on what’s in front of me. A three-week tool one month, a full rebuild of something that already exists but deserves better the next, sometimes a productised SaaS that started as a fix for one specific problem and turned out to matter beyond that. I wanted a frame that could hold all of it.
This site is the thing I’d been meaning to put in one place for a long time. Easier than emailing five URLs every time someone asks what I’ve been up to. It’s mostly a portfolio. But I’m treating it as an invitation, too. If you have a tricky thing a generic agency would handle badly and a consultant would drag into months, email me. That’s the kind of work I want.
I live in Aveiro, Portugal with my wife and five-year-old daughter. We go to the beach, ride bikes, eat too many pastries, catch the occasional weird noise-art show at the local university. If the work on this site looks like your kind of thing, say hi.