Co-founded it and was the first designer in, then built the team. A platform connecting users with 200+ vetted spiritual coaches, from blank canvas to funded product, including the AI systems running inside it and behind it.
Visit the live product · novavista.it ↗Product overview · platform scope
Designed and shipped a full-stack product that grew to real users, real revenue, and a funded round. I was the first designer in, then built the team.
Coaches were juggling 5+ platforms: WhatsApp for messages, Instagram for visibility, Google Calendar for bookings, PayPal for payments. No unified solution existed for this underserved market.
"Every minute spent on logistics is one less minute for your art, and less income. We built NovaVista to fix that."
Coaches used 5+ separate tools for bookings, payments, messages and client management with no single source of truth.
Reviews were scattered across Google, Trustpilot, and personal sites, impossible to centralise or use for growth.
53% of professionals lost clients due to limited payment options and slow, multi-step verification flows.
67% struggled to attract new clients: no clear service presentation, no structured SEO, no unified profile.
User analysis · 4 primary personas across age groups
Platform pillars: freedom · income · loyalty
As co-founder and the first designer in, I owned the entire design function, from discovery to shipped product. Every decision had to balance user needs, business viability, and dev constraints.
30+ coach interviews, 50+ user sessions. Built 4 detailed personas across spiritual backgrounds and tech comfort levels.
Synthesised pain points into 3 platform pillars: creative freedom, income diversification, and long-term loyalty mechanics.
Full IA, core user flows for both coach and user sides, design system with 200+ components, and responsive specs.
Structured documentation and edge case specs that enabled a team of 8 to ship consistently without design bottlenecks.
Problem space · pain points validated through research
NovaVista became the first chat-commerce platform in the spiritual market, combining marketplace discovery, instant booking, integrated payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Satispay), and coach analytics in a single cohesive product.
Shop in 24h · booking system & chat-commerce
Two AI systems run inside the product. I designed the conversation flows, the prompts and the context they sit on, working alongside the people building the model. The hard part was never the confident answer. It was designing what happens the rest of the time.
The assistant handles the questions that used to land on the team: what a service actually involves, which practitioner fits, what happens after booking. Next to it, an AI matching and recommendation flow between users and practitioners. There the design questions were what to show, what to deliberately hide, and how the result gets explained. A recommendation nobody understands is a recommendation nobody books.
The uncertainty model, drawn as a pattern
"I chose admitting uncertainty over conversational fluency. It reads worse in a demo and works better in production."
This one users never see. It sits behind the product and it is the reason a small team can operate a two-sided marketplace across three surfaces. We built it in n8n, and I designed what it says, when it fires and who it is talking to.
Sending is triggered by what a person actually did on the platform. The content is then assembled from their stated preferences, the kind of service or practitioner they were browsing, and what they have bought before.
The email arrives about a thing they were already looking at. Not a template with a first name in it.
Agendas and internal meetings get booked by a workflow that reads our internal chats and takes commands we send from WhatsApp, Telegram or Notion.
The design decision was the surface. We schedule from where we already are, not from a tool someone has to remember to open.
Data collection and reading run through AI, and land in three places on purpose. An alert when a number moves. A dashboard the team watches. And the reports our investors read.
Same pipeline underneath, three formats, because a founder scanning a phone and an investor reading a quarterly need very different things.
The visual language needed to feel grounded and safe: spiritual, but not esoteric. Clean surfaces, intentional space, and a minimal palette where colour always carries meaning.
Visual design system · key screens
Visual design · extended screen set
To deepen brand equity and open a new revenue stream, I designed a full set of custom illustrated tarot cards, printed and distributed to coaches as a loyalty product. Illustration direction, layout, and print specs all handled in-house.
Physical tarot deck: brand extension · illustration direction by Mirko Olindo
Designing as a co-founder means every decision carries real stakes: budget, investor confidence, user trust. I learned to move fast without breaking the system, shipping iteratively while keeping the design language tight enough for a team of 8 to stay consistent without me in every room.
Sitting in on investor pitches and growth reviews fundamentally changed how I frame design decisions, always tied to a metric or a milestone.
A well-documented design system let the dev team move independently. Dev revision cycles dropped ~40% after the system was in place.