Startupgate made a deceptively simple promise: connect founders who are raising with investors hunting for early-stage opportunities. But what made it memorable to me wasn’t the promise. It was that I got to walk the product through an entire lifecycle — from a blank scratch idea, through an MVP, to launch.

It’s one of the startup products that, so far, hasn’t succeeded. Yet it was a pivotal stepping stone in my own path — the place where I actually understood how the lifecycle of a product works.

Most designers join a product once it already has a shape. You inherit a screen, a flow, a backlog. Startupgate was different: I was there from the research stage, when the biggest question wasn’t “how do we design this” but “should it exist at all, and for whom.”

That lifecycle isn’t a straight line. It’s a loop: observe, form a hypothesis, build the smallest thing that tests it, then listen to what the market answers back. Each loop, the customer came into sharper focus — and the features I shipped into the web product became a little less driven by gut.

To know who I was designing for, I didn’t sit in a meeting room drawing personas. I followed founders through their actual journey: from wrestling a pitch deck into shape, through funding rounds, to sitting across from an investor and being asked the questions they hadn’t prepared for.

Follow them long enough and three things come into focus — and this is the real raw material for a product:

• Who they are. Not a “company,” but a person carrying too many roles at once: building the product, telling the story, and watching cash flow, all at the same time.
• What they need. Not more features — to be trusted fast enough to get into the room where the investors are.
• Where it hurts. Every step of preparing to raise is long, fragmented, and easy to abandon halfway.

That third pain led me to the most important design decision in the whole project.

Following founders surfaced a hard truth: before raising a single dollar, they had to prepare a mountain of things just to be recognized by the system. Getting a verified account originally took up to a month. That’s far too heavy a door to place right at the entrance.

The problem wasn’t the amount of information — it was how it was packaged. Everything was crammed into one giant form, filled in one sitting. People looked at it, felt overwhelmed, dropped off, and never came back.

The fix wasn’t to remove information, but to cut the long journey into small steps. Each step asks for one group of information, can be completed right away, and gives a sense of forward motion. Whatever can be verified automatically is handled by the system; whatever needs to wait is split off so it doesn’t block the rest. The result: time-to-verified dropped from a month, to two weeks, then down to a few hours.

What’s worth noticing is that the split version isn’t “easier” — it still asks for everything. It just respects the limits of human attention better. That’s the difference between a flow that was designed and a flow that was merely assembled.

Alongside building the product, I read the foundational books on startup thinking. I believe this is something any UX Designer working on startup products needs — not to sound clever, but to understand why these products run on such a different logic.

One thing that stuck with me most is the difference between “start-up” and “startup” — two words that look almost identical but are different animals.

”start-up” — a business that just opened

Any establishment that just opened is a new business. It might have a clear model, regulars, steady profit. It’s new, but it isn’t necessarily out to discover something nobody knows yet.

”startup” — an organization searching for a model

A startup in the full sense is an organization built to search for a business model that is repeatable and scalable, under extreme uncertainty. Its focus isn’t running smoothly — it’s learning fast: test a hypothesis, measure, and pivot before the runway runs out.

Startupgate, properly understood, was the second kind. And looking back, precisely because it was a search, the fact that it didn’t succeed doesn’t erase the value of what was learned.

Today I’m a product designer at a banking enterprise, working with large systems — many constraints, high maturity. It’s a different playing field entirely. But I still keep a certain priority for 0→1 products.

So I still make time for startups that need fast solutions — using AI to spark an idea into a tangible design, building quickly to validate, and even to scale once the hypothesis holds. That’s where I find myself most useful: at the very start, when everything is still a blank page.