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BALTIMORE · ON PAUSE · WAITLIST OPEN

Bring your idea.
Leave with a prototype.

I'm a product designer here in Baltimore. I've spent ten years designing for GEICO, CNN and IHG, and this year I built and shipped my own app. The FEZ Innovation Lab is six weeks of me walking a small group through exactly what I did, with their idea instead of mine.

Join the Waitlist Who's teaching it

SIX WEEKS · LIVE ONLINE · NO CODE REQUIRED · ON PAUSE FOR FALL 2026

BASED IN
Baltimore
FORMAT
Live online
CODE
Not required
NEXT COHORT
Waitlist first
Zaye Flowers, product designer and instructor
WHO'S TEACHING IT

I'm a designer who just did this.

My name is Zaye Flowers. I've been designing products for ten years: the injury claim you file at GEICO, the results map you watched on CNN election night, the checkout page at IHG. Big companies, regulated work, the kind of details that break if you get them wrong.

Then I did the thing I'd been telling other people to do for years. I built Before Us (a daily quote app of Black American and Black Diaspora voices, credited and in context) from a sentence in my notes to an app on the App Store. I designed it, scoped it, and built it with AI tooling. No engineering team. No funding.

The six weeks in this cohort are the six decisions that took. Nothing theoretical. I'm walking you down a path I finished walking this year, and I'm doing it from here: Baltimore, where I live and where I'd rather the next thing get built.

10+ yrs

Designing products across insurance, media, hospitality and finance

4 yrs

Mentoring designers one to one: where this curriculum came from

85%

Of the designers I mentored landed design roles

1 app

Of my own, shipped this year on the exact path you'll take

WHO SHOWS UP

Baltimore is full of people with ideas ready to be built.

You don't need a company, a co-founder, or a technical background. You need one idea you actually care about and five hours a week. If you recognize yourself below, this room was built for you.

01

Aspiring founders & career switchers

You've had the same idea for two years and no way to get it out of your head. Or you're moving into product and need something real to point at.

02

Black entrepreneurs & creatives

Building the thing yourself is the shortest distance between your idea and the people it's for. This is a room where that's the default assumption, not the exception.

03

Students & alumni around the city

Morgan, Coppin, UMBC, Hopkins: evenings, online, and built to fit around a course load or a first job. Come with a class project or something of your own.

04

Health-tech & civic-tech professionals

You know exactly what's broken in your field because you work in it. Six weeks is enough to turn that into something you can put in front of a decision-maker.

05

Small-business owners with no technical team

You've been quoted $30,000 to build something you can't yet describe precisely. Come describe it precisely first; you may find you can build it.

WHAT YOU LEAVE WITH

Something you can open on a phone and hand to someone.

Not notes on a process. The artifacts themselves: yours to keep, no license, no revenue share, no claim on your idea.

01 · THE THING ITSELF
—A clickable, working prototype of your idea, built with AI tooling
—Test findings from putting it in front of real people
—A 30-day launch plan with three concrete next steps
02 · THE THINKING BEHIND IT
—A written problem statement and target user sketch
—A scoped v1 feature list, and what you cut
—Notes from five user conversations
—An end-to-end user flow and key screen layouts
03 · THE KIT YOU REUSE
—An AI tool workflow that works for you, not a tool list
—A reusable prompt set for scoping, flows and screens
—Templates you keep after the cohort
—Session recordings, available for six months
See the full six-week curriculum Read the FAQ
The Before Us daily quote screen running on a phone.
PROOF, NOT THEORY

The app I shipped is the syllabus.

Before Us is a daily inheritance of Black wisdom: one quote a day with the person behind it. I scoped it to six features, organized it around how people actually arrive, designed the flow and the interface, then built it with AI tooling.

It's in React Native, it's on the App Store, and the case study breaks down what got decided in each week, including what I cut. That's the same six weeks you'd spend on your own idea.

Read the case study See beforeus.app ↗
AND NOT ONLY ME

Regular people are finishing real apps.

One of them lives up the road. None of them write code. We collected nineteen of these (a mother in Maryland, a veterinarian, a cattle farmer), each one linked to the reporting it came from, so you can judge the premise before you spend a dollar.

34 · MARYLAND

Karima Williams

Built Crash Out Diary, a place to vent anger safely. It launched in 2025, went viral, and a mobile app is in progress.

CLAUDE
61 · VETERINARIAN

Erin Downes

Built a call-triage tool for her own clinic, then won $15,000 with it at OpenAI’s hackathon.

CHATGPT + CODEX
50 · CATTLE FARMER

Brendan Kennedy

Pulled live beef prices into one place for Irish farmers, building it between 5am and 7am before his day job.

CLAUDE + CHATGPT
Read all nineteen stories →

These are publicly reported stories, not cohort graduates; the Lab has not run a cohort yet. Every claim links to its source.

ALSO FOR BALTIMORE

Need help sooner? Start with an afternoon.

The Lab is on pause, but the work isn't. For local businesses and organizations, I run shorter engagements: same thinking, smaller commitment.

HALF DAY

Small-business workshop

A working session for owners and their teams: what your customers actually struggle with, what to fix first, and what you can build yourself. Run for your business, or for a group through a local organization.

ONE TO TWO WEEKS

Local consulting

A focused review of the thing you already have (a site, a booking flow, an intake form) with the specific changes that will move it, ranked by what they cost you to do.

ONE SESSION

Talks & community sessions

For meetups, incubators, campus groups and city programs: an honest walk through building and shipping a product without an engineering team. Happy to do these locally.

Tell me what you're working on and I'll tell you honestly whether any of this is the right fit.

Email hello@fezmedia.co Book a 45-min intro call ↗
WEBSITES FOR BALTIMORE BUSINESSES

What it costs to have FEZ fix it.

If what you need is the website itself, fixed or built, these are the prices. Start with a free website teardown if you are not sure what your site needs. Most small-business sites land between Quick Fix and Starter Site.

Quick Fix
from$500

The top 3 issues from your teardown, fixed on your existing site.

Starter Site
$1,650

Up to 5 pages, mobile-first, contact or booking setup, Google Business Profile linked, 2 revision rounds. About 3 weeks.

Growth Site
from$3,000

Custom UX, more pages, booking or e-commerce, copywriting and analytics.

Care Plan
$100/mo

Optional: hosting, updates and small edits.

50% deposit to start, balance at launch. How payments, refunds and the Care Plan work

WAITLIST

The Innovation Lab is on pause.

We're putting our full attention on product, UX, and web design work for clients right now, so we're not running a cohort this fall.

The Lab isn't gone. If you want to design and prototype your app idea alongside a small group of other founders, join the waitlist. You'll hear from us first when we open the next cohort, before it's announced anywhere else.

No commitment, no spam. One email when there's something real to share.

Something went wrong sending that. Please email lab@fezmedia.co and I'll add you by hand.

You're on the list. You'll hear from us first when the next cohort opens.

Need help sooner? We design and build products for founders and small businesses. See our services →

HAVE A QUESTION?

About the Lab, about when it comes back, or about whether your idea fits: send it and I'll answer it myself. No pitch, and no follow-up sequence.

Email lab@fezmedia.co

Bring your idea.
Leave with a prototype.

The Lab is on pause. Join the waitlist and you'll hear first when the next cohort opens.

Join the Waitlist