Co-founded and led all design on a platform connecting users with 200+ vetted spiritual coaches — from blank canvas to funded product.
Product overview — platform scope
Designed and shipped a full-stack product that grew to real users, real revenue, and a funded round — as the only designer on 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 leverage 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 sole designer and co-founder, 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
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.