Design concepting and investor storytelling for a pre-funded startup
Summary
RevenueBase (Boston) is a SaaS solution for B2B sales and marketing teams that provides a customer database as a service to successfully reach and engage with prospects. RevenueBase’s solution aims to be the most complete, accurate, and easy-to-use B2B data solution in the world.
I worked with RevenueBase’s founding CEO and CTO to perform abbreviated concepting for the company’s initial product vision, to clarify the offering, and tell the story of the product’s value proposition to prospective investors and customers before seed funding.
Working with my partner Craig Newell (a seasoned software architect and engineer), my deliverables and activities for this project included:
- Providing critical feedback on the founders’ initial concept from a product design and technical perspective to help set a vision for the product before it was built
- A Discovery workshop with the founders to understand the product vision and brainstorming to design priority user journeys
- Designing an interaction model to ensure a self-service user experience that would be extensible as the product offering grows
- Designing and documenting the product journey and critical flows for the MVP release as a set of branded wireframes to enable product storytelling
Process
During the very early stage of RevenueBase and before seed funding, I worked closely with the CEO and CTO co-founders to participate in concepting design for the product vision to tell the story of the product’s value proposition to prospective investors and customers.
Over a period between October and November 2021, I completed this engagement in three phases:
- Discovery
A project kickoff included gathering existing documentation and graphical assets. We conducted a discovery workshop with the founders to understand the current product vision. - Brainstorming
From the product vision and several subsequent review sessions, we documented a product concept with three priority user journeys tied together into an extensible self-service application flow. - Storytelling
We delivered rough Figma wireframes of key screens from each user journey from the brainstorming outputs to enable storytelling.
This product concept and wireframes were then used to communicate the company’s vision to prospective investors and customers, resulting in a successful seed funding round.
Business results
RevenueBase’s founders used the deliverables from this project to share their product vision with investors and stakeholders. After this project completed, RevenueBase officially launched in the spring of 2021. In April of 2022, RevenueBase announced its $6 million seed round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The funding round includes investors from ten venture capital firms working alongside RevenueBase’s founders Mark Feldman and Milenko Beslic to expand its offering further.
References
Mark Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder, RevenueBase
“As the CEO of an early-stage venture in Boston, I hired Karen Donoghue and Craig Newell from HumanLogic to assist in an investor presentation and help our founding team envision our product as a concept to be shared with various stakeholders.
Karen and Craig provided invaluable feedback and concrete recommendations on our product planning, using their deep expertise and skill in interaction design and data architecture to help set a vision for the product we will build. In addition to tackling the technical and data-intensive aspects of our product, they focused on ensuring the user experience concept is simple and promotes self-service, one of our business goals as a SaaS offering.
Karen and Craig are very skilled in understanding founders’ needs, helping them understand how to prioritize and focus on designing new product concepts that clearly and succinctly tell the story of a new product while being mindful of the constraints of developing software technology.
I highly recommend Karen and Craig to early-stage founders for product planning and designing new technology product concepts.”
(November 2021)
Milenko Beslic, CTO and Co-Founder, RevenueBase
“I am CTO and Co-Founder of RevenueBase, an early-stage startup in Boston.
Karen Donoghue and Craig Newell from HumanLogic recently worked with me and RevenueBase’s CEO to prepare an investor presentation for fundraising. They efficiently worked with our founding team to set a vision for the product that we will build, helping us to envision our product as a concept to be shared with stakeholders. They provided clarifying feedback and concrete recommendations on our product and design planning, leveraging their deep expertise and skill in interaction design and data architecture.
In addition to tackling the data-intensive and technical aspects of our product, Karen and Craig focused their deliverables on ensuring ease of use and a self-service experience, one of our business goals as a SaaS offering.
Karen and Craig are very skilled in understanding founders’ needs, helping them understand how to prioritize and focus on designing new product concepts that clearly and succinctly tell the story of a new product while being mindful of the constraints of developing software technology.
I previously worked with Karen Donoghue on product planning in a VC-backed fast-growth early-stage startup in Boston and asked her to help with this project in 2021.
I highly recommend Karen and Craig from HumanLogic to early-stage founders for product planning and designing new technology product concepts.”
(January 2022)
Skills
Discovery workshop, interaction model design, storytelling for investment