Dre Steinberg on AI-assisted web design and digital infrastructure
Dre Steinberg is Founder of Designed To Conquer, a creative tech company that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses strengthen their digital presence through web design, SEO, AI-powered solutions, email marketing, and digital strategy. This conversation explains how the company combines creativity, technology, and automation to build digital infrastructure that helps small businesses get found and convert visitors into clients.
Use AI to speed research, SEO, content frameworks and repetitive tasks, but keep humans in creative and strategic decision-making. Prioritise a strong, owned website, publish useful content for SEO and AEO, and focus on clarity and trust rather than chasing every new AI tool.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Designed To Conquer started in 2022 from something I was already doing naturally: helping entrepreneurs turn their ideas into something people could actually see, understand, and buy into. What started with web design evolved into a creative tech company because I realized most small businesses don’t just need a better-looking website. They need a stronger digital infrastructure behind the business.
What makes us different is that I don’t separate creativity from technology or strategy. We combine custom web design, SEO, AI, email marketing, automation, and digital strategy to solve the bigger problem: helping business owners become more visible, operate more efficiently, and create an online presence that can actually support growth.
People can learn more about our approach at Designed to Conquer or explore our custom web design services. https://www.designedtoconquer.com/webdesign
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
A lot of our business still comes through referrals, relationships, networking, social media, and people who have followed my work over time. That trust is valuable, but I’m intentionally working toward more customers discovering Designed to Conquer through organic search, AI search, educational content, and our overall digital footprint.
I want more people finding Designed to Conquer organically through Google, AI search, educational content, case studies, and the authority we’ve built online. The goal is for someone searching for a small business web designer, SEO services, website redesign, or digital strategy to discover our work before we’ve ever spoken.
That’s also why we’ve been investing more into the Designed to Conquer website as an actual growth platform rather than treating it like an online brochure. www.designedtoconquer.com
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
I’ve handed a lot of the research and first-draft work over to AI. I use it to analyze information, organize ideas, identify opportunities, support SEO research, develop content frameworks, and speed up repetitive parts of my workflow. It gives me more time to focus on strategy and execution.
Where I pull it back is creative decision-making. I’ve experimented with letting AI take more control of branding and design, but that’s where the human element still matters. AI can generate 100 ideas quickly, but it doesn’t automatically understand why one idea is right for a particular client, audience, or moment. I want AI assisting my creativity, not replacing my judgment.
A good example of how I prefer to use AI is our Entrepreneur Grant Hub. AI is incorporated into the experience to help entrepreneurs draft and refine grant responses, but it’s being used to support the entrepreneur rather than remove them from the process. www.designedtoconquer.com/granthub
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Absolutely. People are doing much more research before they ever contact a business. They’re checking your website, social media, reviews, search results, and now AI-generated answers. By the time someone reaches out, they may already know what you offer, what you’ve worked on, and whether you appear credible.
I can’t attribute a significant percentage of my leads directly to ChatGPT yet, but I’m preparing Designed to Conquer for that shift now instead of waiting for it to become the norm. That’s why I’m focused on traditional SEO alongside AEO: creating clear, authoritative, structured content that gives Google and AI assistants a better understanding of who we are, what we do, who we serve, and why we’re relevant.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I would tell web designers, marketers, and creative professionals to spend the next 12 months becoming easier to find, easier to understand, and easier to trust.
Learn how AI can improve your research, SEO, content creation, lead generation, automation, and internal operations. At the same time, strengthen the things you actually own. Build a strong website. Publish useful content around questions your customers are already asking. Create case studies. Collect reviews. Develop your SEO and AEO strategy. Clearly explain what you do and who you do it for.
I’d ignore the pressure to chase every new AI platform that launches. You don’t need 30 AI subscriptions, and you don’t need to automate every human interaction in your business. Figure out where technology makes you faster, smarter, or more efficient, and keep human expertise where it creates the most value.
That’s essentially what we’re building at Designed to Conquer: combining web design, SEO, branding, automation, and AI to create digital infrastructure that helps businesses get found, get booked, and grow. www.designedtoconquer.com
Thank you to Dre Steinberg and the team at Designed To Conquer for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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