One evening in late 2022, product designer Soren Iverson assembled a concept: iOS alarms with Figma’s multiplayer feature, so everyone on the alarm would have to confirm they were awake before it could turn off. He posted it, it went viral, and he spent the next two years producing one absurdist interface a day, with no client, no brief, and no plan. That practice became the foundation for the agency he runs today.

Iverson, the digital product and marketing agency Soren launched in April 2024, operates out of Orange County, California, with 16 full-time employees and a client list that includes Meta, Figma, Duolingo, and Coinbase. The work spans brand identity, web, video production, and the close refinement of how established products look and function at the user level. 

“We partner with what we call ‘inevitable companies,’” Soren says. “There are these big milestones that a company goes through as they grow up, and we will work with companies around those moments regardless of stage.”

That framing follows a design career built across agencies and two in-house stints at Square and Cash App, where Soren worked on Square Online Checkout, Square Photo Studio, and Cash App’s design systems. By 2022, he had spent the better part of a decade designing products and brands with a single commercial objective. The satirical posts were assembled over a weekend back from Joshua Tree, posted without strategy, and within a month produced a jump from roughly 900 Twitter followers to 100,000. “I took the work that I do and just looked at it in a completely different way,” he says.

The follower count was not the point. What the daily posts produced was a professional network of designers, founders, and technologists Soren could not have reached from a base in Costa Mesa. Those connections, combined with surviving layoffs at two agencies and at Cash App, made the case for starting Iverson. “It became clear that there’s inherent risk in staying at a place for a long time, too,” he says.

Three Creative Modes, No Backlog

Soren describes the satirical practice not as a system but as a set of thinking caps he can rotate through. One mode attaches an interface to a cultural moment: when Justin Timberlake’s DWI arrest made headlines, he built a Spotify screen showing the most recently played song; a Nosferatu tie-in offered a ticket upsell to bring 3,000 rats into the theater. The approach works like a newspaper cartoon, latching onto something happening and integrating an interface around it.

A second mode imagines a product designer who is well-intentioned but misses the mark by 5%. At platform scale, that 5% compounds quickly, and the satirical version makes the dysfunction visible. A third asks for the worst possible permutation of an existing product: a YouTube pre-roll ad that restarts if the viewer looks away. “There’s no system,” Soren says. “But I think there are lanes.”

The daily cadence ran on pressure. He tried to post by 7 a.m. each day. “There were times where it’d be like three in the morning,” he says. There was no backlog, no content calendar, and no archive of unused ideas. Other designers were running parallel daily projects at the time, which added a quiet competitive element: how long before the ideas ran out?

When a Satirical Concept Ships, He Says ‘Go For It’

A concept Soren posted satirizing a buy-now-pay-later integration with DoorDash shipped as a real product roughly a year or two later. His reaction was not pride of ownership. “I don’t think I’m necessarily the one that is spurring these thoughts,” he says, “because product timelines are typically so long that companies have thought about this stuff well before.”

The line between a satirical interface and an actual product roadmap item, Soren argues, is narrow by design. Product teams at large platforms are working the same terrain. “Ideas are easy,” he says. “Execution is really hard.”

Someone from a large technology company, which Soren declines to name, contacted him to ask whether he minded if they built one of his posted concepts. His reply: “No, dude, go for it.” The practice was never about ownership, but about generating conversation and making himself and other people laugh.

Iverson Comes In at Turning Points

Soren describes three scenarios that bring clients to Iverson. The first is a growth milestone: emerging from stealth, closing a funding round, or absorbing an acquisition. 

The second is a misalignment between product and brand, what he calls a seesaw. “The product is amazing, but the brand hasn’t caught up to meet that. Or the brand is awesome,” he says. Iverson’s role is to bring them into alignment, or build both when neither is developed.

The third scenario involves internal constraints: two teams that have failed to reach a solution, or a company that lacks the time or resources to execute. Service lines span brand identity, web, video (launch material, customer testimonials, connected TV and broadcast ads, paid social campaigns), and out-of-home.

The agency uses what the team calls the “Cheesecake Factory” model internally: offer everything, and systematize only after the work has succeeded. “As we knock things out of the park, we systematize and scale as a byproduct of having done that work,” Soren says. 

The positioning as a “digital product and marketing agency” is intentional. Soren argues that today’s agency work demands a level of technical fluency that firms built in earlier eras often do not carry, and that the term signals that capacity to technology clients.

A Studio Where Bad Ideas Are a Requirement

Iverson has 16 full-time employees and a contractor bench that expands when work is heavy. Soren keeps the full-time headcount lean, shaped by watching agencies cut large teams after losing major clients. “I’d much rather be playing strong defense rather than being super spendy,” he says.

The creative process runs against what he calls the “dog and pony show”: designers staying late to produce finished boards and presenting a fixed set of options. Instead, Iverson works iteratively and in live conversation. The team runs exercises where designers generate deliberately bad ideas, then pass them to a colleague to transform into viable ones. “The line between a bad idea and a good idea is actually very thin,” Soren says. The Figma Slides project, produced through this kind of live ideation session, went on to win a Webby Award.

Hiring reflects the same approach. Soren asks candidates to share something recent and messy, not a polished deck. He also asks them to describe something creative they noticed recently, a brand, a commercial, a restaurant. The response, he says, reveals how someone perceives the world outside of deadline pressure.

The Reward for Good Work Is More Work

Soren’s advice to creators considering a similar path is to find strong collaborators early, price the work correctly, and expect difficulty before momentum arrives. “Prioritize finding great people to go on the journey with,” he says. “Going at it alone is really hard.”

His advice to brands centers on voice-over imitation. When one brand’s social personality becomes a category reference point, the instinct elsewhere is to replicate it. “Maybe,” Soren says. “But maybe you don’t. Maybe there’s something else that you can do.” Modest deviation from category norms, he argues, carries less risk than it appears, particularly for organizations with the resources to run experiments.

Now in its third year, Soren describes Iverson’s team’s current focus as delegating decisions rather than just tasks and building a shared understanding of what great work means inside the company. One internal principle the team hears often is that the reward for a job well done is more jobs to do well. 

“Iverson is an organization that is relentlessly pursuing creative quality while building an organization that prioritizes excellence and performance,” he says, “and does all of that while not taking itself too seriously.”

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast