Thoughts on design, development and running an independent studio in Paris

A few months ago, Luc and I launched a side project. We called it The Booking Duo. It started from a frustration we kept running into with fitness studio clients: Mindbody is a solid backend. But the front-end experience it gives studios — the iframe widget — is genuinely painful. For users, and for conversion.

We get asked this regularly. You are a studio, but you seem to have a lot of people involved. Are you an agency? Do you have employees? The answer is no on both counts, and it is worth explaining why.

We add an llms.txt file to every site we ship now. Clients ask what it is and whether it does anything. Here is the honest answer, and the exact contents of ours.

Most studios will not tell you what they charge until you have spent thirty minutes describing your project. We do the opposite. The full grid is below, with ranges that hold for at least eight months out of twelve.

How Della Mattia picks between Zenchef, SevenRooms and Tock for restaurant clients in France, the UK and beyond. Real cases, plain advice.

Web design is a loaded term. For some it means choosing fonts and colors. For others it covers everything from UX research to motion. Here is what it means to us, in five propositions.

For twenty years the goal of being online was to rank on Google's first page. In 2026 that is changing. A growing share of decisions, recommendations and product discoveries happen inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. This is what GEO is, why it matters now, and what we are doing about it.

For over a decade I worked in communication and digital marketing, mostly on the brand side. I commissioned agencies, managed campaigns, briefed designers, watched projects ship and watched projects fail. In 2017 I founded Della Mattia. I am now on the other side of the table. This is the short version of what changed.

Three CMS, three sets of clients. Half the prospects who reach out have already picked the wrong one for what they actually need. Here is how we make the call.