First hire.
Award-winning app.

First week was a speed run: turn the proof of concept into a live app that could onboard real customers, in time to matter for the next funding round. It shipped fast, and it shipped ugly. Seven days and 33 steps of onboarding later, we signed up our first real users. That secured funding, and set a singular focus: growth.

To get users in faster, I cut those 33 steps to five, and turned them into independent modules, so users could finish onboarding later without losing progress. A big early friction point. Then I started to lay down the design system every following feature would be built from. This also let our engineering iterate in isolation. An agile company in the making, by design.

Our initial stated goal was to bring pensions to people without one. This required educating our users before we could sign them up. Huge market, but ultimately a tough sell, which meant lagging user acquisition. I argued for the opposite: target people who already had a pension. This changed the battleground. We went from educating, to winning users on product.

So the product shifted, optimized for a new audience. Built around combining pots people already had, instead of opening an empty one and waiting on a first contribution. Signups went from around 100 a month to around 600, and each arrived with an existing pot, so the refocus raised what a signup was worth as well as how many there were. We added users and AUM, keeping us on track with the business plan, and making investors happy.