About
Learning and making.
I'm Dave Merwin. I've spent three decades building things for NIH research projects, Department of Education initiatives, American Airlines, Dropbox, Google, scrappy startups, local nonprofits, and plenty in between. I've been a creative director, a strategist, a developer, and an executive sponsor at DEPT, and I've built healthcare games, web applications, and the internal systems that keep organizations running. The projects that went well usually had someone who could see a clear path from the idea to the first real step, and that's the job I like best.
Outside of work I carve spoons, which is where I learned that every project goes through a stretch of despair before it gets good. We plan for that stretch with every client.
Why FORGE exists
You usually know what you need. What gets in the way is technical complexity, competing priorities, or a team pulling in different directions. We help with that part. We work through the strategy with you, run workshops when a team needs to agree, and build the software. We'll also tell you when we think something won't work, because that's more useful to you than agreement.
We're AI Native, which for us means AI is part of nearly every step of the work. It lets us take on problems in industries we haven't worked in before and move faster than a team our size normally could. Thirty years of experience still decides what good looks like, and AI lets that experience cover a lot more ground.
The network matters
FORGE is a small studio on purpose. When a project needs specialists, we bring in partners we trust, so the team grows when the work calls for it and shrinks again when it doesn't. You pay for the people working on your project and not much else. The partners we work with share a few habits with us: they build things that matter, they move quickly without cutting corners, and they leave clients better at what they do.
PRODUCT DESIGN PARTNER
Atlas & Studio
Atlas & Studio is a product design and strategy studio founded and led by Juli Toiberman. They work in short sprints that get a team to a clear direction before the design work starts, which is how we like to work too.
When a FORGE project needs deep product design, we bring in Atlas & Studio.
DESIGN & FRONT-END PARTNER
Drew Todahl
Drew is a UX designer and front-end developer who focuses on accessible, user-centered work. He takes a project from user flows and wireframes through visual design to responsive, fast-loading builds, and he thinks about accessibility from the first sketch.
He brings keen insight and a studied approach to every project we share.
You don't need a big team or a long runway to build something meaningful. With the right partner, an idea becomes a thing people use. What are you trying to make? We'd like to hear about it.
Some of our favorite people
"Working with Dave & his FORGE tools is amazing. He has an uncanny ability to cut through the AI hype and target the exact answers you crave, in record time. Dave isn't just a great guy to work with, he's a secret weapon on how to use AI to improve your business."
"The flexible development process has made it possible for us to work together as a team and develop a solution that meets the needs and increases the value of the end result. Knowing that we can experiment and even make mistakes without them being incredibly costly is a huge comfort as we proceed into uncharted territory to help protect kids from child sexual abuse."
"Dave’s understanding of digital products and product strategy has been crucial as we move towards new solutions in a high touch market. He’s become a integral part of our team, leading workshops with stakeholders, vetting vendors, and developing strategy for the museum. He's made our team stronger and our product is setup for success in ways that are hard to even quantify!"
"The sprint gave us something our usual meetings couldn't—a structure that made it safe to disagree. We'd been circling the same questions for years, but this process forced us to actually make choices. By the end of day two, we weren't just nodding along anymore. We were building something together."
"We were doubtful going in that we could follow a process that would take so many diverse ideas and come up with a unified product, but something shifted over those six days. We began to see the product coming together. After sharing it and getting feedback from our potential users, we knew we had settled on the right direction."
"Talking directly with practitioners changed everything. We thought we knew what they needed, but hearing them react to our concepts in real time—watching what excited them and what fell flat—that's when the project got real. One conversation in particular made us completely rethink the navigation. We wouldn't have caught that from a survey."