Designkey

• Think ahead: Design Key shares what it would do differently before work begins, including when part of a proposed plan should be dropped.
• Work precisely: The team learns how a business operates before designing software, focusing on process as well as code.
• Stay after launch: The team that builds a product can continue running it for years rather than months.

Design Key has a team of 30 across design, engineering, and strategy. The team works with clients launching new products as well as businesses changing software that already supports their operations.

Founder

Daniel Killyevo founded Design Key in Tampa. He holds a master's degree in computer science, wrote his first line of code at 15, and has more than 15 years of software development experience. Before Design Key, he worked at Ciklum, Corrigo before its acquisition by Terminix, and JustEat. He has delivered more than 50 web and mobile products.

His work focuses on cloud-system architecture, API and data integration, and engineering-team development.

Operational workflows

• Quoting: Configurable line items, multi-tier pricing, approval flows, e-signature, and conversion to invoice.
• Dispatch: Calendar views, route optimization, field-crew capacity planning, customer notifications, and real-time schedule updates.
• Billing: Recurring billing for managed services, milestone billing, late-payment automation, and QuickBooks synchronization.
• Customer management: Customer profiles, communication history, document storage, and customer-facing portals for invoices and service requests.
• Tax workflows: Document intake, client task tracking, deadline management, and e-filing integrations.
• Reselling software: Organization-level isolation, tenant-branded interfaces, and separate billing accounts for service businesses selling their tooling to others.

Experience and guidance

Design Key has shipped three production professional-services platforms across security, freelance, and tax verticals. The company states that a focused workflow MVP typically takes 8–14 weeks and starts at $30,000+.

The team evaluates whether off-the-shelf software is the better choice and recommends a custom build only when needed. Its approach includes establishing a source of truth before synchronization, using offline-first functionality where field connectivity is limited, and designing around the people who operate the business, such as owners, dispatchers, and bookkeepers.

Related capabilities include QuickBooks, Stripe, HubSpot, and Salesforce integrations, field-service mobile apps with offline-first synchronization, photo and signature capture, GPS routing, and SaaS development for turning service-business tooling into a product for an entire vertical.

Design Key provides full-cycle digital services from concept to launch, including design, development, AI integration, and business analysis.

Design

• UX/UI design
• UI/UX redesign

Application development

• Custom software development for startups and enterprises
• Front-end development
• Backend and cloud development
• Native and cross-platform mobile apps
• Dedicated development teams and individual developers who embed with a client's process and backlog

SaaS and product development

• SaaS product design and development
• Low-code application development
• No-code development on Bubble

Integration and strategy

• Third-party API integration
• OpenAI integration development
• Business analysis to define requirements and optimize processes

Design Key's stated areas of expertise also include mobile and web apps, prototypes and MVPs, marketing websites, system architecture, data and analytics, online services, custom integrations, and workflow automation.

• AI-powered applications
• Chatbots and virtual assistants
• Custom AI-powered features such as content creation, automated summaries, and data-driven insights
• Personalized recommendations
• Internal AI tools for business
• AI workflow automation
• Voice and video AI integration, including integrations with ElevenLabs and HeyGen
• AI strategy and consulting

Delivery process

The AI integration process includes:

1. AI audit: Needs assessment, use-case ranking, data-readiness audit, and success metrics.
2. Data preparation: Indexing, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation.
3. Model selection: Selection of models such as GPT-4 or Claude, with fine-tuning where appropriate.
4. Integration: API, SDK, or custom-pipeline implementation.
5. Evaluation: Testing accuracy, latency, safety, quality, and cost.
6. Deployment and monitoring: Production deployment, analytics, iteration, and ongoing optimization.

A typical engagement is 10–14 weeks to the first launch. The five delivery phases are project kickoff, discovery and design, prototype and testing, development, and launch and growth.

AI technology

Design Key works with OpenAI, Claude, Llama, Hugging Face, ElevenLabs, HeyGen, Leap AI, Copy AI, LangChain, Pinecone, Vercel AI SDK, TensorFlow, Python, Node.js, and AWS Bedrock.

AI integrations are tailored to the client's workflows and data. The company emphasizes data privacy, bias mitigation, content safety, transparent AI behavior, scalable architecture, monitoring, fine-tuning, and continuous improvement.

Integration types

• Payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, and Braintree
• CRMs and ticketing systems, including Zoho, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk
• Workflow automation tools such as Zapier
• E-commerce APIs for inventory, order processing, and product search
• Chat systems such as LiveChat, Intercom, and Zendesk Chat
• Travel and booking services
• Analytics, marketing automation, and tracking systems
• Custom RESTful and GraphQL APIs with documentation, versioning, and authentication

The company also integrates with Stripe, PayPal, Zapier, HubSpot, Salesforce, Twilio, Postman, Airtable, Zoho, Notion, JotForms, Cognito Forms, OpenBank, Swagger, and GraphQL.

Delivery process

1. API audit: Review requirements, documentation, systems, and API limits.
2. Authentication setup: Configure OAuth, API keys, or role-based access control.
3. Integration design: Define data mappings, synchronization strategies, error handling, and rate-limit behavior.
4. Prototype and testing: Move real data through the riskiest integration first and identify edge cases.
5. Development: Build with retries, idempotency, logging, sandbox testing, and live-environment testing.
6. Launch and growth: Deploy monitoring, document each integration, and provide dashboards and a support plan.

A typical engagement is 10–14 weeks to the first launch. Design Key emphasizes encrypted data in transit, secure token storage, rate limiting, versioning, error handling, and industry standards such as PCI-DSS and SOC 2.