End-to-end product design — from research through prototype — plus a brand-new design system, for a community-driven venture capital platform where founders raise smarter and investors access higher-quality deals.
Client
VentureBacked
My Role
Lead UX / Product Designer
Domain
Venture Capital · Community SaaS
Year
2024 – 2025
Duration
6 months
Tools
Figma · Maze · Dovetail · Notion
Overview
VentureBacked is a community platform where founders raise smarter and investors access higher-quality deals. The brand promise is direct — Founder-Friendly, Investor-Smart. Trust at Every Touchpoint. No BS, No Barriers. The product had to live up to it.
I joined as Lead UX / Product Designer and owned the experience end-to-end for six months — from foundational discovery research through interaction design, prototyping, and the build of a brand-new design system that the engineering team could ship against. The work centered on one core question: how do you remove the friction in founder–investor connections without losing the trust signals both sides depend on?
The Challenge
Founders and investors already had options. LinkedIn, AngelList, intro requests over Twitter, warm intros via accelerators. None of them solved the actual problem. Founders were spraying decks into inboxes they hoped were real. Investors were drowning in deal flow they had no way to trust. The opportunity was clear — but so was the risk of building yet another marketplace nobody returns to.
Low-trust matching — Founders and investors had no consistent way to evaluate whether the other side was a credible, relevant fit before investing time in a call.
Profile fatigue — Both sides were exhausted by long onboarding forms on competing platforms. Drop-off mid-signup was the single biggest threat to a community that needed both sides present to work.
No shared visual language — Early product surfaces had been assembled ad-hoc. Inconsistent typography, color, and component behavior undermined the credibility the brand was working hard to build.
No design system to scale against — Engineering was rebuilding similar components from scratch on every screen, and design changes were slow to propagate. Velocity was capped by the absence of foundations.
Research
Before a single screen was sketched, I ran a structured discovery program spanning six weeks. The goal was to deeply understand both sides of the matching equation — how founders actually decide whom to pitch, and how investors actually decide whom to take a meeting with.
18 moderated interviews with seed-stage founders, angel investors, and emerging fund GPs across the US to map real-world fundraising and deal-evaluation workflows.
Built dual journey maps — one for founders raising a round, one for investors sourcing deals — to identify the moments of highest friction and lowest trust.
Heuristic audit of 9 adjacent platforms (LinkedIn, AngelList, Signal, Crunchbase and others) — documenting what the category had taught users to expect and where every competitor was still failing.
Quantitative validation survey to test the strength of qualitative themes across a wider founder/investor sample before committing to a design direction.
Unmoderated Maze studies on early concepts for the matching, profile, and onboarding flows — surfacing comprehension issues before high-fidelity design began.
All interview transcripts tagged and themed in Dovetail, producing a searchable insight repository the whole team — design, product, marketing — could draw from.
Key Insights
Insight 01
"I don't need more intros — I need the right intros." Both sides described their inboxes as the bottleneck. Signal quality, not volume, was the unmet need.
Insight 02
"Tell me in 10 seconds whether this person is worth my time." Profiles had to lead with trust signals — stage, thesis, check size, traction — not with biographies.
Insight 03
"If I can't sign up in three minutes, I'm out." Onboarding length was directly killing supply on both sides. The platform had to feel lightweight on entry and earn additional information over time.
Insight 04
"It has to look like it belongs in this category." VC is a credibility business. Visual polish wasn't decoration — it was a precondition for users taking the platform seriously enough to put their real reputation on it.
Design Process
I structured the design work around three pillars that came directly from the research: signal over noise, trust by default, and respect for everyone's time. Every screen, every component, every micro-interaction had to defend one of those.
Persona work for both sides of the marketplace — founder archetypes, investor archetypes — grounded in real interview quotes, not assumptions.
A prioritized problem statement and a clear set of design principles the team could push back against scope creep with.
Low-fidelity sketching, then mid-fidelity wireframes in Figma, then concept reviews with founders and investors from the research pool.
High-fidelity prototypes, three rounds of usability testing with real users, and weekly design critiques with engineering before handoff.
Design Decisions
Three design decisions had the greatest impact on how the product feels to use:
Signal-first profiles — Profiles were rebuilt around a glanceable header that surfaces the most decision-critical information — stage, thesis, check size, traction, last activity — above the fold, so both sides can evaluate fit in seconds, not minutes.
Progressive onboarding — The signup flow was cut to three lightweight steps. Everything else — deeper investor thesis, full deck, traction metrics — is asked for only when the user reaches the moment where it would actually help them.
Trust as a UI primitive — Verification badges, source-of-data labels, and "last verified" timestamps were treated as first-class components — present consistently wherever a user is making a judgment call about another person on the platform.
Design System
A community platform lives or dies on consistency. Every screen a user touches is either reinforcing or eroding the trust they have in the brand. Halfway through the engagement, I made the case to leadership that we needed to stop hand-building components and invest in a real design system — and then I built it.
The system was structured in four layers, each one built so it could be picked up by engineering and shipped without me in the room.
Color tokens, type ramp, spacing scale, radii, shadows, and motion primitives — all defined as variables in Figma and mirrored 1:1 in code so design and engineering speak the same language.
Buttons, inputs, cards, tags, avatars, badges, modals — every component built as a Figma variant set with full state coverage (default, hover, focus, disabled, loading, error) and documented for engineering parity.
Higher-order compositions — form layouts, navigation patterns, empty states, error states, profile layouts — so future designers and engineers don't reinvent the same decisions on every new screen.
Usage guidelines, do's and don'ts, accessibility notes, and rationale for every major decision — captured in Notion alongside the Figma library so the system is self-explanatory to anyone joining the team.
By the end of the engagement, the system was the source of truth for every product surface. New screens could be assembled in hours instead of days, and engineering had a clear contract to build against — which is exactly what a growing team needs.
Impact
The work shipped as the foundation for VentureBacked's relaunched experience. The most meaningful outcomes were qualitative:
A coherent product, end to end. Every screen now reads as part of the same platform. Founders and investors land in an experience that visually earns the credibility VentureBacked's brand promises.
A lighter, faster onboarding. The redesigned signup flow stopped asking for everything up front. Both sides of the marketplace now reach a usable profile state in a small number of steps — directly removing the single biggest drop-off the original flow suffered from.
A design system the team can build on. Engineering and design now share a single source of truth. New features ship against a documented library, not from scratch — and that compounds with every new screen the team adds.
Trust signals built into the UI. Verification, recency, and data provenance are now first-class components — not afterthoughts. The product visually communicates the "Trust at Every Touchpoint" promise on every screen.
Key Learnings
A two-sided marketplace is a trust design problem first. Every interaction is someone deciding whether to spend their reputation on a stranger. Trust signals can't be a layer you add later — they have to be baked into the components themselves.
A design system is leverage, not overhead. The hardest part was making the case to invest in it mid-project. The easiest part was demonstrating the velocity gain once the team had it in their hands.
Research saved the product from being a clone. Every adjacent platform had taught us bad habits. Going back to founders and investors directly was what surfaced the gap nobody else was solving — signal quality, not signal volume.