Danny Mac
Product Specialist Experience Designer App Store Featured Developer
App Store Featured Developer
Product Specialist Experience Designer
Product Specialist
Experience Designer
Featured Developer
Hey, I'm Danny McCarthy
I plan + design + build digital products & experiences. If it shows up on a 📱 or 🖥… I can plan and design it, or at least help make it better. If it’s intended for an 📱 or an 🖥… I can take it from concept scribbled on a napkin, to live in the App Store and make it spectacular!
SOME OF MY WORK
DOWNLOAD MY APPS
Check out my current solo projects:
Birch – Organized Photo Notes
Mycons – Custom App Icons
Want to work together?
TOTAL TRANSPARENCY: My Hourly Rate
Transparency is a HUGE personal thing for me. I’m totally comfortable listing my rate here publicly, as I believe it helps set a tone of honesty and mutual respect, starting from from step zero. Unfortunately, personal bandwidth is a finite resource, so I have to pass on many of the projects I get pitched. But I’m always on the lookout for exciting new things, so please reach out and say Hi!
In rare cases, I sometimes work on a fixed project based fee. But an hourly rate structure is ultimately the most healthy balance of fairness, safety and mutual respect for both sides.
Also, I totally understand that amazing ideas and incredible people don’t always have competitive budgets to match their electrifying energy, drive and hunger to build something spectacular. At the end of the day, the most important thing to me is spending my time building cool stuff with good people and actually enjoying the ride. I can be flexible so please don’t hesitate to reach out, even if it seems like working with me might not be within your budget. I genuinely enjoy being helpful anyway I can, even if it’s just friendly advice.
My Standard Rate
$275/hr
I work fast & cover the same ground as a small team of senior PMs, Designers & Devs
100% Focus. I work on 1 project at a time.
S-Tier native Developer
S-Tier User Experience Designer
S-Tier Interface Designer
Product vision, planning, management, identity, strategy, business model, etc.
Basically… If we green light a project, you can think of me as an on-demand contract cofounder, who can be unleashed on every aspect of the product.
HOW CAN I BE HELPFUL?
Here are some specific examples of how I can be particularly helpful
My absolute bread & butter:
Lean, rapid, hyper-focused MVP builds
This is probably my absolute, 100%, most FAVORITE thing to do in this world. It’s an unusual talent, but I’m really good at seeing what’s not there yet… taking a super high level, back-of-the-napkin concept, thinking through all its subtle nuances, and being able to visualize and plan all the moving pieces, down to their most sub-molecular components… then rapidly finessing the concept through the entire product cycle, to an MVP live in the App Store.
Warp speed planning + design + building. All while constantly maintaining the perfect balance between sacrifice, prioritization and quality. The whole point of rapid prototyping and MVPs is to collect data on an idea to validate proof of concept, right? There’s nothing worse than spending cycles to ship, only to get false negatives on a grand-slam concept, because you implemented 10 features poorly, instead of polished versions of the most important 2 or 3.
If you’ve got an awesome idea, and are looking for someone to get into the weeds on a rapid MVP project, I’m gonna have a hard time saying no 🤩
Anything built for an screen
Iconic tools-of-the-trade pairs: James Bond & his Walther PPK… Chewbacca & his Crossbow… Beatrix Kiddo & her Hattori Hanzō… Luke & his Lightsaber… Danny & his Xcode+Swift
Alright… one of those has no business being on the list with the others. Whatever, let a nerd fantasize about being cooler than he actually is. Point is, Xcode & Swift are my weapons of choice. If it’s for an device, I can build it & make it spectacular.
WordPress Websites
I make all my websites from Premium WordPress Themes. It’s not trivial, but it’s also SIGNIFICANTLY faster & more cost effective than a custom website from scratch. Turning months into weeks, and many $Zeros into a few $Zeros.
I am VERY fast and comfortable working with WordPress themes and can certainly help here to save ⏱ and 💰
Any UI or UX Design
While I like to stick with building for devices, I can plan & design for any platform, any scale, any complexity.
From making an interface clean & beautiful, to complex Experience Usability Theory, I can design from scratch, or make improvements to something that’s already alive.
Deck & Presentation Design
The visual information architecture of a slide is just as important as the information itself. Even the most exciting info isn’t gonna land with max impact if people are subconsciously overwhelmed when the slide hits the screen.
Proper spacing, sizing, typography, etc. are crucial for allowing people to easily absorb and digest the information you’re showing them.
Sales & Investor Mock Prototypes
There are always times when words and jpgs just aren’t enough. You need something tangible and usable to show off, but a full working build may not be realistic or logical. Whether it’s to show off a concept that Sales pitched to a client, impress investors early with something tangible, or just to validate usability before spending cycles on a full build, being able to tap, click and play with something in a couple weeks, rather than months, is invaluable in so many cases.
Another one of my specialties to the rescue… Prototyping with Mock Data! I’m lighting-fast with building slick interfaces. It’s the “making it actually work for real” that sucks up the most time. By SIMULATING APIs with local fake data models, you can have a “usable” prototype to play around with in a tiny fraction of the time. I even do this at the beginning of every single one of my projects, just to get the “feel” of it right, before digging into the engines and backend logic.
Ready for a bonus slice of cake? If you’re smart about it and mock your fake API with some sense and foresight, most of it ends up just being “plug & play” when the real API is built out. So you didn’t waste time building something useless that “doesn’t really work”… you actually pulled a 200 IQ project planning move and extracted significant sales/investor/feedback value out of a super early build phase! Having cake is so much better when you can eat it too.
MY WORK FEATURED
Here are some of the places my work has been mentioned in the media.
MY WORK FEATURED
Here are some of the places my work has been mentioned in the media.