wEB DESIGN | AI | Technology
Designed an AI-powered platform with mentorship provided to help early-stage startups
Team
YEAR
2025
ROLE
Product Designer
Tools
Figma, Slack, Figjam
Project Overview
DeepVista helps early-stage solo founders refine their product vision by simulating missing perspectives and generating insightful, shareable insights. It addresses both internal (skill/clarity) and external (feedback/social) gaps.
At Cocreate, we're tasked with a project that aims to support early-stage founders who require assistance with marketing, product development, and storytelling due to a lack of expertise. It seeks to provide clarity through professional mentorship and raise awareness of AI assistance to boost their productivity.
Problem
Jing Conan Wang, Founder of DeepVista AI, is looking for designers to create his platform, aiming to achieve an AI thinking partner for early-stage and solo founders.
Founders face overwhelming advice from multiple sources, making it hard to prioritize actions. There is no cohesive platform that integrates product, marketing, and strategy.
Many resources explain what to do (e.g., build an MVP), but fail to provide practical, step-by-step guidance for founders with no prior experience. When they do seek mentorship, most advice isn’t tailored to the founder’s specific stage, market, or emotional state.
Target Audience
Mental overload; burnout in solo founders
High failure rate for first-time founders (18%)
Founders with lack of tech knowledge
Time-Strapped Founders: Overwhelmed by tasks, seeking efficient progress tracking.
My Responsibility
As a Product Designer, I worked on every stage of the design process with the team and led the presentation pitch to the client.
Secondary research, competitive analysis, design strategy, brand strategy, UX wireframes, prototyping, user testing, iterations, and presentation decks
Solution
Need Solution
Need Solution
Point
Point
Point
Ten weeks to design a website to develop a mentorship program with AI assistance for startup founders.
The project timeline included:
2 Weeks: User research, problem redefinition through affinity mapping, and strategizing solutions and key features.
2 Week: Product Validation and redefined scope, problem and needs, research presentation.
2 Weeks: Ideation + UX Architecture, design user flow, MVP wireframe
2 Weeks: Design annotation + testing, observe founder use, refine feedback loop
2 Weeks: Polish & iterations, design documents, design system, final presentation
The team and I have questions for our client to ensure we receive clear expectations of what he would like to see for this product.
During our meeting with Jing, we asked Jing what vision you wants for DeepVistaAI. Jing clarified his vision based on the PRD (Product Requirement Document) provided for the team. His vision for DeepVista AI is:
"I want to build a healthy relationship between humans and AI. I put it this way as a partner. It is a partner with whom you trust each other. It's like you do things together."
"So I view DeepVista as really a thinking partner, which is like for humans, specifically for founders, but we can also extend this into like more personas down road."
Other questions we also asked Jing:
Are we focusing on solo founders or small businesses, or are we looking at broader tech companies? What would be the scale of the target audience?
Jing answered, "So I will say the answer is not set in stone on this. I would love to hear your thoughts as you do more research. But given that said, I think it is the people who lead this most who need to get started by themselves, like the solo founder, and a lot of small business owners are the same."
How did DeepVista come up? So did you see any of the founders' experiences [Jing interviewed founders before our meeting] or pain points during the product vision or the road mapping time?
Summarize, Jing answered,
"A. Hiring process to find someone to do a specific role can be hard to do on your own.
B. You sell all the time, like whenever you talk to your potential customers or any friend or potential employees, you sell all the time, so you need a pitch.
C. ChatGPT, one complaint, they need to be very good at prompt engineering to get an answer and to to, to a lot of founders, they don't have the skills, and they feels like waste of time. Second thing is that oftentimes the answer, get back from ChatGPT is very generic."
Will it be a mobile device, a tablet, or do you want to remain web-based, or just have it all be responsive?
Jing answered, " Great question. I think, for a short answer to your question, is that eventually we want to be mobile, but for the MVP, it will be for web."
Overall, we had many more questions but were limited by our meeting timeframe. We all prioritized which questions are important to kickstart our research progress. Jing's input, along with the provided context, was amazing and interesting, which made him eager to help other founders like himself. We are all glad that he trusts us with this design process and helps bring DeepVista AI to life.
RESEARCH: CompetitIve Analysis
What founders use to find mentorships/seeking advice, and what AI tools and platforms do founders use to build their company?
We all asked ourselves those questions during our internal research, which we conduct every day for 10 weeks. We all share brands based on the PRD, Jing's meeting, and a couple of tools we believe best fit DeepVista AI to evaluate their products for strengths and weaknesses. For the competitors, we based our analysis on four attributes. We examined 11 competitors; however, I will select 4 to represent each attribute for the analysis.
Identify competitors based on the following four attributes.
4 Key Insights we found from competitive analysis
Dynamic strategy generation: Unlike Sintra AI’s fixed templates, DeepVista can adapt in real time based on user input.
AI-guided support: Fills the gap when human mentors aren’t available, something a lot of mentorship platforms don’t offer.
Combine AI intelligence with mentor-style guidance, especially valuable for non-technical solo founders.
The space is getting crowded with similar AI tools (e.g., Sintra, ChatGPT plugins), so standing out will be critical.
Secondary Research
Who is our target audience? What problems are early-stage founders facing right now? How can DeepVista AI address these issues?
We conducted secondary research with 10 key questions to understand and define who these early-stage founders are.
Here is the list of 5/10 questions:
What types of founders rely most heavily on ChatGPT right now?
What is the market landscape for founder growth?
What are their main usage scenarios?
What are the most common pain points or bottlenecks founders face in early-stage company building?
How do different founder personas (e.g., technical, business, solo, team-based) approach product development and market validation?
DeepVista AI was a new landscape for the team. Analyzing these questions helped us identify founder archetypes, challenges in current solutions, and opportunities. We then tied the findings to "Hair-on-Fire" founders, who require immediate, efficient support to overcome these obstacles.
Participants falls under these categories
Organize individual
Spontaneous individual
Communicate by text/DM
Currently uses social media to find events
Currently uses event planning app
User Interviews and Surveys
Empathize with people who like to go out and plan the day or night
I've conducted remote interviews with 3 participants and surveyed 7 participants within the age group of 24-31, women and men to understand their relationship with looking for new places to explore and how they communicate.
During interviews, I want to know the common themes by focusing on communicating, planning, and finding new places with friends and family. (bullet points format 2 columns, bullet points one side or both, simple easy to consume)
Participants falls under these categories:
Organize individual
Spontaneous individual
Communicate by text/DM
Currently uses social media to find events
Currently uses event planning app
Common themes from the Affinity Map
Too many apps for me to use to send invites to friends
RSVP function to know who’s attending
Personas
Let's design for spontaneously social butterfly and organize introvert nerd
The resulting AI-powered scheduling app offers a seamless user experience, allowing individuals and businesses to effortlessly manage their schedules.
Intelligent Scheduling
AI algorithms analyze user preferences, availability, and priorities to generate optimized schedules.
Calendar Integration
Seamless integration with popular calendar platforms such as Google Calendar and Outlook, ensuring synchronized scheduling across devices.
Personalization
Customizable settings allow users to tailor scheduling preferences and priorities to their unique needs.
Here, the outcomes and achievements of the project are highlighted, including user feedback, adoption rates, and industry recognition.
Increased Efficiency
Users report significant time savings and improved productivity through optimized scheduling recommendations.
Positive User Feedback
High user satisfaction ratings and positive reviews highlight the app's intuitive interface and powerful AI capabilities.
Growing User Base
The app quickly gained traction among individuals and businesses worldwide, with a steady increase in user adoption and engagement.