Maxim Schram and the useful art of being annoyed

A remote control with an obstinate keypad has a peculiar talent: it can make an otherwise reasonable person consider throwing something. Maxim Schram found a more productive destination for that frustration. While teaching interaction design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, he created a website where students could put awkward products on display and propose improvements. The objects were familiar. The invitation was less so: show everyone what went wrong, then show them what you would change.

That was the beginning of RedesignMe, the venture he founded in 2007 and later developed into CMNTY. Its early collection included difficult remote controls, confusing parking-payment machines and electronics that demanded close companionship with their instruction manuals. A classroom exercise had acquired the raw material of a business: people who knew exactly how a product disappointed them, and manufacturers with reasons to care.

The original proposition gave users several ways to make their point. They could upload photographs and homemade videos, sketch a solution, comment on another person's submission, rate it or redesign it. Frustration could become something inspectable. A customer no longer needed the vocabulary of a professional designer to demonstrate that a machine had made a simple task absurd.

Schram's stated purpose was to reduce the distance between producers and consumers. The design lesson was practical. Once a product left the shop, its maker could lose sight of what happened next. Here was a place to collect the evidence. Even a bad button could become a useful introduction.

The complaint department gets a shop

The first website had its own rough edges. An early visitor praised the idea but described having to refresh after submitting an example and negotiate three vertical scrollbars to inspect an image. His example concerned the position of a Mini Cooper's volume control. A website about awkward interfaces was receiving an interface review of its own. It was an unusually appropriate way to start learning.

Companies began asking whether they could put their own products in front of the community. Schram developed a commercial version, with challenges and a reward system. Contributors earned RDMs, an internal currency redeemable for goods in the site's shop. RedesignMe was combining a design community, a service for manufacturers and a small marketplace. The infrastructure of participation included an incentive to come back.

The venture's small early team included senior developer Clemens Gruenberger and interaction designer Sharon Bindels, alongside Schram as owner and concept developer. They worked at Eindhoven's High Tech Campus and supplemented the team with freelancers. It is a useful glimpse behind the crowdsourcing vocabulary: a public invitation to thousands of people still depended on a few people making the invitation work.

There was also a reason to gather people in the same room. In 2010, RedesignMe launched RDMlive after clients wanted closer contact with contributors. Around 50 guests attended the launch in an Eindhoven hotel space that had been empty that morning. For an online community business, the next product involved chairs, a room and conversation. The request came from the customers.

What happened when Pickwick answered back

Tea supplied one of the clearest demonstrations. Pickwick invited RedesignMe's community to develop concepts around its brand. Schram's account describes 90 active participants producing 198 concepts in six weeks, with ideas spanning flavours, packaging and promotional objects. More than 500 people commented. Some participants supplied a written idea; someone else could turn it into a three-dimensional model.

The telling detail was Pickwick's presence in the discussion. Feedback from its community managers encouraged further contributions. The company could respond while ideas were still taking shape, and participants could build on one another's suggestions. An open brief became an exchange. The practical lesson was about attention: inviting people to contribute creates an obligation to answer them.

He let the crowd go

Success brought a less comfortable lesson. Schram described a market that had filled with competitors. Designers spread their efforts across sites, and companies wanted greater control over their projects. The interest in working with outside contributors remained, but the way buyers wanted to do it was changing. Owning a public pool of contributors was becoming a difficult position to defend.

He shifted towards supplying the software and expertise that let organizations run their own communities. Market-research agencies, once rivals in pitches, became distribution partners. Blauw Research, Ruigrok and TNS were among the partners he named. The business moved behind the scenes, where its customer could maintain the relationship and CMNTY could provide the machinery.

This makes the name change more revealing than a cosmetic rebrand. RedesignMe described an activity happening in public. CMNTY described a capability that other organizations could use. Schram was prepared to give up the original shape of the venture while preserving the part that customers still wanted. For a founder, that is a demanding edit: remove a familiar feature from your own story.

New York felt like coming home

On May 28, 2015, CMNTY officially opened its New York office. The address was in Midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from Grand Central. The Dutch company had already served American customers, particularly around New York. Opening there brought it closer to people who had been buying its tools from across the Atlantic. Zach Katagiri would manage the office.

Schram's reaction was personal: “It feels like coming home.” The company's third international office followed its UK launch the previous year. Its tools were available in more than 13 languages. Those are useful measures of distance travelled from the original teaching exercise, though the work itself remained recognizable: help an organization make contact with people whose experience it needed to understand.

By 2019, CMNTY was refining the less glamorous work inside that contact. Its Pulse dashboard helped moderators handle comments, responses and ideas, organize content with bookmarks and keep track of community members. Schram discussed communities that could remain active between individual research projects. Gathering a conversation was only the beginning; someone still had to follow it, organize it and make it useful.

In October 2021, UmbrellaBrand Group acquired CMNTY for an undisclosed sum. More than half the company's turnover came from the United States and Canada. Schram continued as CEO in New York at the time of the transaction. The buyer, whose businesses included MarketResponse, wanted a stronger North American presence and a software offering alongside its research and data operations.

A different kind of troublesome machine

Schram's working life now includes Skripted, his New York cloud-architecture business. His AWS Marketplace offering covers Kubernetes architecture, deployment and optimization, with automated infrastructure and cost controls. The clientele and vocabulary have changed since the classroom. The work still asks how a complicated system can become easier for someone else to operate.

In April 2026, he began publishing a build log about a new penetration-testing tool aimed at small development teams. A cloud client had needed security evidence for a large customer while lacking the budget and staff for a traditional engagement. Schram set out to offer a deliberately scoped $500 test. In his account, the first version was already finding problems and producing mistakes worth fixing.

He put both in the log: an overlooked administrative endpoint, false positives, gaps in framework recognition and difficulties around authenticated sessions. A founder's progress report can become an elaborate exercise in hiding the interesting parts. Schram made those imperfect parts part of the account. The reader could see a tool being corrected while a customer used it.

By May, another engagement was changing his understanding of the product. A small team fixed issues, he rescanned, and further improvements to the scanner revealed more work. A sequence of tests began to resemble an ongoing process. He was careful about the conclusion: this was one customer's behaviour, something to learn from before declaring a general rule.

In July, his next step connected an externally observed vulnerability with the customer's source code. The aim was to identify the relevant file and line, or the infrastructure setting where a remedy belonged. Reporting a problem was becoming a route towards locating its repair. He described linking findings to code as live work, with assistance producing patches still ahead.

“I'm trying to learn.”Maxim Schram, April 2026 build log

Leave room for the answer

There is a recurring practical question across these projects: what happens after someone points out a problem? The student uploads an awkward object. The manufacturer replies. A moderator follows a discussion. A developer receives a finding and needs somewhere useful to begin. Each stage adds work that a simple invitation to participate leaves unfinished.

Schram has changed what he sells when the people using it have changed what they need. The public design community gave way to software for private communities. An affordable test began suggesting a repeated workflow. Those changes are easier to understand when placed beside the original classroom exercise: an initial design becomes something to inspect, discuss and improve.

The remote control remains a fitting place to begin. Almost everyone can recognize the absurdity of struggling with an object designed to make life easier. Schram made that recognition actionable. Years later, the objects include cloud infrastructure and application code, but the useful moment is still the one when somebody stops accepting the awkwardness and starts describing a better arrangement.