Anyone with experience in finding and working with design partners at the very early stage of a project? Any learnings or tips?
Behance and Dribble should be your first place to find partners with serious design skills.
Personally, in the very early stage of the project i don't care about the design to be perfect or polished 100%, just needs to look better or similar to the competition.
Once the project is validated and cashflowing then turn to design polish.
I've been using claude design a lot lately for marketing content. It works pretty well. you can just paste the screenshots of designs you like and it gives you a few really nice options.