Darkcore Studio

I’m pouring my 10+ years of experience in graphic design into building personal brands for motivated people with a strong vision for their future.

You’ll love working with me if you’re a fan of a collaborative approach instead of giving orders. You’ll be thrilled with the result if you’re highly motivated and also tired of the bullshit in your industry. 

The entrepreneurship road is rocky. Anyone telling you something else is most likely lying.

Working with me will get you closer to your goals in a fraction of the time you’d spend learning skills you don’t need and spending time you don’t have. Because you’ll know – and experience – what it’s like to have someone with experience build you a brand that helps you succeed.

Founder

Instapage

Instapage is the leader in post-click-optimization ™. 

Our solution helps marketing teams increase advertising conversions through the building, personalizing, and optimizing of landing page experiences at scale. 

With over two million landing pages converting above 22%, Instapage is helping 15,000+ customers across 100 countries capture more value from their campaigns.

A Leader in G2Crowd’s Conversion Rate Optimization, A/B Testing, and Landing Page Software grids, Instapage is ranked #1 in customer satisfaction.

Affiliate Program Manager

Ensuring the customers have the best experience possible when contacting Instapage Support. Providing help via email & livechat and maintaining constant contact with our clients.

Customer Success Agent

Freelancer

Graphic Designer

Continental

My main responsibilities as a traffic planner included organizing tire transports to assigned countries, checking and optimizing delivery flow. Other daily tasks included forecasting the loading plan for the following days, offering support in occurring problems related to missing tires and solving issues like shipment delays.

Traffic Planner

Regional Department of Statistics

As an operator during the 2011 Population & Housing Census, my main tasks were to identify any errors that could have occurred in the questionnaires, correct these errors and then introduce the correct data in the system. Good communication between co-workers and attention to detail were vital as any wrong information introduced in the system would have affected the overall result.

PC Operator

The era of swanky brands & websites devoid of substance and differentiation is long gone. 
Personal branding means highlighting not just what you can do, but also how you think and why.

Let's work together to attract your ideal clients through psychology and conversion-oriented design. 
You don’t need to be an expert designer to get it done. You just need to work with one.

I help those transitioning from the corporate world to entrepreneurship to show up with confidence 
and clarity in front of their ideal clients. Let me turn the idea you’ve been sitting on for years into an 
asset that builds your business. 

Work with me to avoid:
❌   wasting time & money on scraping together your own brand
❌   being stuck in a loop & never shipping what you need 
❌   having an “all show and no substance” brand

I know how to get you on the fast track to achieving your goals because I've been where you are.

I moved away from corporate to start my own business in 2019. And I never looked back!

Work with me to:
✅ Give your work a palpable form which elevates your know-how and approach
✅ Build a coherent brand you can use, repurpose, and extend across channels
✅ Get assets that are uniquely yours and which support your professional stance


We'll work together to build you a solid personal brand that serves you for years to come. 
It will be natural, it will feel like YOU and it will tell your story in a way that gets you noticed 
by those you want to work with. 

Working with me means having a partner you can count on. 
I'm in it for the long-term, so my clients feel comfortable leaving creative decision-making to me. 

Contact me to see why: lucian@darkcore.studio 📧

Good things take time, but it’s easier to get there when someone's got your back!

Lucian-Alin Grofsorean

Emanuel Martonca

Soft Fight

🖥️ We have build a pricing optimisation app based on our proprietary methodology > JUST Value Framework.

📚 TRAINING and WORKSHOPS
> Choose the right pricing model
> First principles of pricing for tech services
> Value selling process
> How to raise prices for existing clients

Founder. Trainer. Consultant. Fractional Pricing Manager.

Ontario Die International

Business Development and Strategy [Fractional]

IntelligentBee

AI-enabled Human-first Customer Care solutions aimed for business growth.

Director, Revenue and GTM Strategy [Fractional]

Manu's Elastic Graphite Newsletter

Economic uncertainty, flexible workforces, AI threatening to fundamentally change software development. The IT & software services industry is in turmoil. Alternative pricing models are needed.

Subscribe to get this weekly pill with practical tips on pricing. 

Updates go out every Friday at 10:00am CET.

#Improve #TechServices #Pricing

https://softfight.com/eg-subscribe/

Writer

Thagora

Entire industries and manufacturers are quickly realising the challenges and opportunities they face in the transition to “Industry 4.0”.

Smart, connected equipment and software, tools that are tailored to individual industries and the use of algorithms and data to drive efficiency are already a reality for many industrial applications.

Thagora is a sophisticated software and hardware solution for the Leather Upholstery Industry.

World-class companies in 
- High-End Furniture
- Automotive and Aerospace
are using Thagora customised implementations in their Leather Cutting Operations.

Sales Manager

Gemini CAD Systems - a LECTRA company

Thagora Product Manager

Thinslices

Team and Product Management. Sales. Marketing. 

Coriolan

Strategy and market research. Managing the re-branding process.
Redesign of the sales process, creating a positive experience for the clients.
Organizing the marketing and sales activities, with an emphasis on process and automation.
Developing and implementing an e-commerce sales channel.

Sales and Marketing Manager

Dexia Bank Belgium

Responsible for the organization-wide implementation of a new customer experience central competence, aimed at improving the level of service delivered to our clients.

Senior Customer Experience Expert

Project leader for the launch of a new payments offer for retail clients: responsible for designing the strategic concept, calculating a business case, describing the detailed scope for the operational implementation. Delivered presentations of the project for validation and approval to the different departments of the organization and executive management. 
Responsible for the day-to-day product management of current accounts.
Main achievements:
      Reached a 15% increase of total yearly revenues, in the context of a mature and stable market.
      Designed a new financial report for the current accounts products, which allows for a better estimation of future volumes and impact on P&L.

Product Manager Payments Systems

Followed trainings on all relevant subjects related to the functioning of a financial institution.
Participated in a team exercise having as objective the outlining of a strategic and action plan for Dexia in Romania, following a hypothetical acquisition of C.E.C. by Dexia Group. Worked mainly on the marketing strategy and a new distribution model and have proved to be a valuable member of the team.

International Management Trainee

Compiled the 'Banking in Romania' report, a comprehensive study of the banking market in Romania in 2005, based on publicly available data. The three main subjects developed in the report were: the retail banking customer, regional development and banking industry.

Market Research

Petrom SA Romania

Filling Station Manager

The IT & software services industry is in turmoil, with 3 powerful macro forces affecting it:
> Economic uncertainty has led to much longer sales cycles
> Hybrid work and flexible workforces are changing the cost structure, creating operational challenges for delivery teams
> AI is threatening to change the very essence of what it means to do software development.

In this environment, hourly billing, cost-based pricing and taking 2 weeks and multiple video calls to create a proposal doesn't cut it anymore.

Since 2012 I’ve been involved in more than 350 negotiations for software services and technology, for both camps: buyers and sellers.

Everything I write and talk about comes from this experience.

Founder, Pricing expert

Soft Fight is the single source of truth for your sales strategies and pricing.
A way to minimise decision making noise and biases in your price calculation process.
We work with software services companies to change mindsets, implement scalable, efficient methods and tools to manage the pricing and sales process.

Dacă am avea trenuri de mare viteză, drumul Cluj > Iași ar dura 1,5 ore. Pe autostradă ar fi sub 3 ore.
Dar nu le avem, astfel că cele 8 ore de condus mi-au dat suficient timp să mă gândesc la dezbaterea de la Cluj.

Lipsa infrastructurii de transport este o frână majoră în calea dezvoltării multor sectoare, de la logistică și agricultură până la prelucrare și producție.
IT-ul este printre puținele domenii care au reușit să crească masiv în ciuda acestui handicap. În ultimii 25 de ani, IT-ul a ajuns la aproape 8% din PIB fără să depindă de infrastructură.

Vineri dimineață ne-am întâlnit la un working breakfast cu 35 de antreprenori și manageri din IT la sediul Yonder pentru a discuta despre impactul AI asupra industriei.

Din toate ideile discutate, sunt câteva care merită explorate mai mult.

Una dintre concluzii a fost că schimbările aduse de AI au resetat industria tech la nivel global, iar asta deschide o fereastră de oportunitate pentru IT-ul românesc.

Daniel Metz a încurajat companiile de servicii IT să folosească acest moment pentru a depăși pe dreapta firme similare din Germania și alte țări dezvoltate, care se mișcă mai încet. Companiile românești au acum șansa de a rezolva cu AI probleme reale din industriile non-tech, în colaborare cu firme locale, pentru a vinde apoi această expertiză în piețe cu putere de cumpărare mai mare.

Tudor Ciuleanu (Tudi) a subliniat că e în interesul tuturor companiilor de servicii locale să fim percepuți ca o țară în care clienții găsesc parteneri competenți de tehnologie, nu forță de muncă ieftină. Asta presupune colaborare, schimb de idei și soluții care funcționează, pentru a crește fiecare și împreună.

Paul Cipcigan a încurajat managerii să adopte un mindset de produs în firmele de servicii: experimente rapide, modele de pricing diferite, servicii adaptate pe industrii specifice și programe de parteneriate.

Voicu Moldovan a prezentat modele concrete de colaborare bazate pe crearea de valoare: echipe locale care combină expertiză tehnică cu experiența acumulată în industriile clienților.

Una dintre ideile cu impact imediat a fost aceasta: să evaluăm echipele și angajații nu doar prin tehnologiile pe care le cunosc (Java, .NET, React), ci și prin industriile în care au acumulat experiență (healthcare, financials, automotive, etc.). Este o schimbare mică în aparență, dar strategică în profunzime.

Mi-aș fi dorit să avem un transcript generat de AI de la eveniment, pentru că au fost multe întrebări bune și răspunsuri aplicate. Nu avem transcript, dar las aici slide-urile prezentării cu care am deschis dezbaterea.

The pricing engineer for IT & software services | Consulting, workshops & Agentic AI workflows

SaaS, AI and new business models in IT services

Vibe coding looks like magic for anyone without domain expertise,
but only gives power to those who already know what they’re doing.

AI doesn’t democratize software development.
It lowers the barrier to starting, but not to finishing.
When systems break, that initial speed becomes a liability.

The promise:
build software without being a developer.

The reality:
you still need engineering mental models, good design instincts, context awareness, and much, much more.

We're solving the wrong problem.
The real bottleneck in software isn't writing it.
It's knowing what it will cost before you commit.
Delivery knows the hard part is understanding the system behind the code, the tradeoffs no tool explains, the invisible dependencies you only learn after breaking them once.

I keep seeing people who tried to build entire products with AI tools.
They fly through the first 80%.
Then they touch a small detail, and everything underneath collapses.
Not because the AI is “wrong,” but because the system was always more complex than the speed suggested.

This is why estimations are so fragile.
They aren’t predictions, they’re compressed histories.
Built from patterns across past projects, the scars teams accumulate, the failure modes they’ve learned to anticipate.
And yet most teams still try to estimate with nothing but memory, pressure, and optimistic rounding.

Your delivery history is training data.
Those 47 past projects? They're data points.
Pricing logic. Scope creep patterns. Team velocity. Complexity multipliers. Edge cases that always add two weeks. The types of clients who change their minds halfway through.
Your team just can't hold it all in working memory while scoping project 48.
That's the irony.
If we trust AI agents to write software, why don't we trust them to estimate it?

If AI can already scaffold applications, generate diagrams, and write production-ready code, it’s strange that the one thing still done manually is the thing that sets budgets, deadlines, margins, and client expectations.

Estimations should be the first place where AI helps, not the last.

===
PS. We build Custom Estimation AI Agents.
Trained on your delivery history, pricing logic, and the patterns across dozens of completed projects, the kind of institutional memory no human team can reliably hold when scoping the next one.
So sales can move fast without dragging delivery into every guess.

Hourly billing is toxic
because it punishes you if you are good.

Hourly billing feels “logical” in IT services.
It’s simple, measurable, predictable.

But hourly billing punishes efficiency.
It rewards slowness, not expertise.

Let’s compare 2 software developers, both paid 60 EUR per hour. 

Developer A can finish project M in 240 hours. The client pays 240*60 = 14.400 EUR. 

Developer B would finish the same project in 140 hours, at a similar level of quality, because he is more experienced, more proficient with the technology used, is more disciplined with his coding practices and the way he manages his mental energy. The client would pay 140*60 = 8.400 EUR. 

The client would receive from Developer B the same quality, in a shorter time and would pay almost half the price. 
The more skilled, more efficient developer would get paid a lot less.

And over a full year, working a similar number of total hours for multiple clients, both developers would make the same money.

From Developer B’s perspective, this is a punishment for being good.

Is there any incentive for Developer A to improve his skills, to deliver higher quality?
No. As long as he can charge this rate and clients accept it, nothing needs to change.

But when you are paid for deliverables or outcomes, your best interest is to develop and use methods, tools, ways to do things better, faster. The client gets better value, the vendor also wins.

If we compare value created with value captured, the imbalance becomes obvious.
Charging the same hourly rate gives both developers the same earnings over a year, but Developer B creates dramatically more value, simply because he finishes more projects for more clients.

This is why hourly billing becomes toxic for everyone involved:

> The employee has no incentive to improve. They learn that overestimating effort is safer.

> The vendor tries to account for every minute, while the client constantly fears being overcharged.

> The client takes on transaction risk and therefore expects lower prices.

> Nobody can know the true project price upfront, which breaks the basic “value vs. price” buying logic.

> It forces short-term thinking across forecasting, team performance, quality, and planning.

Dynamic pricing is the alternative that finally corrects this misalignment.

It allows you to price:
based on scope instead of time
based on sprints instead of hours
based on outcomes instead of effort
based on quality, speed, trust and impact.

In other words, dynamic pricing realigns the value created with the value captured.

If you want a practical way to start implementing dynamic pricing, I’ll break it down in the next webinar:

Beyond fixed rate cards: how IT leaders adopt dynamic pricing
📅 Wednesday, December 3, at 12 PM CET for 30 minutes, on Zoom

You can register here:
🔗 https://lnkd.in/drG9Kezg

#ITServices
#AI
#DynamicPricing

Warning: this idea might make your sales team uncomfortable. But it will improve your software delivery

For IT services and software development companies:

what if you created your own “vibe-coding-something”
as a wrapper on top of an existing solution
built in your infrastructure
with your context, pre-set inputs and prompts

you give access to it to your customers
and ask them to use it to build quick prototypes for whatever they need built
(MVPs for startups, new features, modules, interfaces, etc.)

you then use that as starting point
and project documentation
for your engineering teams?

Then ask yourself: how do you price this?
You charge for hours of effort?
With a fixed rate card?

If AI can help non-technical leaders clarify what they want before engineers start building, it can also help companies clarify how they price before a proposal leaves the inbox.

Dynamic pricing isn’t about charging random prices.
It’s about replacing guesswork with logic:
> what the client actually needs
> how much risk you carry
> the constraints they operate under
> the value their business gets
> and how demand changes across contexts

This is exactly what I’ll cover in our next webinar:

Beyond fixed rate cards: how IT leaders adopt dynamic pricing
📅 Wednesday, December 3, at 12 PM CET, on Zoom

You can register here:
🔗 https://lnkd.in/drG9Kezg

#ITServices
#AI
#DynamicPricing

For years, DOING was the business in IT & software services.
Now you have to add THINKING to your portfolio.

DOING was easy to price. You had fixed rate cards because the work was commoditized. A mid-level developer costs $X/hour whether you’re selling to Bank A or Startup B.

But THINKING doesn't work that way.
The moment you move into strategic work, nothing is identical anymore.

Different clients.
Different risks.
Different levels of ambiguity.
Different organizational contexts.
Different value created.

You can't price judgment with a rate card.
Charging $200/hour for strategy that saves a client $10M is cheating yourself out of the market.
Charging $200/hour for strategy that saves them $100K is overpricing yourself out of the market.
The work is variable. The value is variable. The pricing must be variable.

AI is changing the economic model underneath your feet.

How?
AI is best at structure, translation, pattern replication and artifact generation.
AI is weakest at ambiguity, judgment, trade-offs and emergent problem framing.

THINKING means
1. Strategy
> Framing the problem
> Prioritizing outcomes
> Making trade-offs
> Understanding business constraints
> Deciding what matters and why

2. Design & Prototyping
> Exploring options
> Validating assumptions
> Figuring out what works
> Rapid learning loops
> Choosing direction before specs exist
> Tech architecture trade-offs
> Navigating organizational/technical constraints

DOING means
3. Specifications & Documentation
> Architecture diagrams
> Detailed flows
> Data models
> Acceptance criteria
> Tech stack evaluation
> Low-fidelity to mid-fidelity UI

4. Delivery & Execution
> Coding
> Testing
> Integration
> Deployment
> Automation
> Implementation

Some questions you need to answer:
How much of your revenue comes from pure execution?
How much of your billable hours are spent on DOING work?
How much of your pipeline is still pure time & materials?

There are only two paths forward:

Path 1: Move up the stack and price the THINKING correctly.
Path 2: Productize the DOING and price it like a solution.

There is no other Path that doesn’t involve dynamic pricing.
Static pricing belongs to a static world.
AI killed that world.

If you want a practical way to start implementing dynamic pricing, I’ll break it down in the next webinar:

Beyond fixed rate cards: how IT leaders adopt dynamic pricing
📅 Wednesday, December 3, at 12 PM CET for 30 minutes, on Zoom

You can register here:
🔗 https://lnkd.in/drG9Kezg

#ITServices
#AI
#DynamicPricing

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The Battle

Lucian-Alin Grofsorean

Emanuel Martonca

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The Battle

Lucian-Alin Grofsorean

Emanuel Martonca

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Emanuel Martonca's LinkedIn Performance

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