Vertical
Branding, Product Design
I joined this startup as employee #1 after helping prototype the concept aimed at solving a big problem in commercial construction. Each month, the amount of compliance paperwork that has to trade hands in order for contractors to get paid is eye-watering. We built Vertical to automate and streamline the process for all participants, leading to faster payments and less manual work.
Product prototype design for proof of concept under the working name Skyrise Pro
Officially branded platform as Vertical once we were ready to scale
100% of product design and marketing design
Series A deck and story, along with pitching investors and managing those relationships
Product and design ownership over "New Hub", our AI assistant using email to handle document ingestion and new UI to approve and route documents for payment
Customer discovery interviews
Sprint planning and retros
Adobe Creative Suite
Intercom (product tours and customer support)
Sketch (pre-Figma)
Abstract (version control and engineering handoff for Sketch)
Figma (Prototyping and engineering handoff)
Hubspot
JIRA
Additional Notes
I have to be honest, Vertical ended up being a heart crusher. We were certain we'd cracked the code to transforming the compliance process required for construction payments.
What worked
We got a foothold within the second largest title company in the country (First American), where they used Vertical as part of their comprehensive lien waiver management process. We also secured one of Chicago's largest commercial GCs (Pepper Construction) who managed hundreds of projects with Vertical.
We also integrated our solution with Procore, allowing GCs to pipe over contractors and contract values already stored on that platform to populate lien waivers automatically.
What didn't work
While we got traction with companies open to a new approach, our product-market fit at large struggled. It was hard to overcome the incumbent spreadsheets which most operations rely on. (We even designed some of the interfaces to look and act like spreadsheets as a result.)
This friction was enough that it hindered us from reaching the rapid sales growth we needed to show investors.
Vertical Product
Various screen shots from the platform as used by commercial general contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and title company users.
"NewHub" Prototype
Near the end, we pulled a pivot to build an AI-based workflow that would use clients' existing email and documents. By simply copying or forwarding to our unique email address, our AI system would ingest the documents, make all connections to projects and contractors before automating the lien waiver process and informing the project manager or accountant they were ready for action.
Prototype Walk Through - The video below shows the prototype I built to walk through with users during product discovery sessions.
