The one where I did all of it: the research that found the product, the v1 that shipped, and the brand it went to market with.

Role: Lead designer, end to end Year: 2024 – 2025 Sector: Connecting IT experts and MSPs to US small businesses Delivered: User research and synthesis · v0 feature design · iteration through v1 · brand identity and guidelines · marketing site and GTM visuals Outcome: Shipped to paying customers

Tags: Product design · 0→1 · User research · Brand · Marketing site · Marketplace

Small businesses buy IT the way they buy plumbing: rarely, urgently, and without knowing whether the price is fair. GuideStack set out to connect them to people who do know.

I led the research that defined who this was actually for, designed the v0 features and iterated them into a shipped v1, then built the brand around it: logo, color, type, usage rules, and the marketing site and GTM material the launch ran on.

This is the project where you can see the full range in one place, because there was nobody else to hand any part of it to.

Doing the brand and the product together isn't just efficient, it changes what you make. The identity had to survive being used by a team with no designer, so the logo rules, the colour set and the site templates were designed to be applied rather than interpreted. That's the same decision as building a component library, made in a different medium.