MainStreet
Built the design team and systems for a $500M-valued fintech startup
The Problem
MainStreet built software that helped startups automatically identify and claim government tax credits (R&D credits, payroll tax offsets, and similar programs) that most early-stage companies leave on the table because the process of finding and claiming them requires expertise they don't have. The product was simple enough to describe, complex enough to execute on, and high-stakes enough that errors carried real legal and financial consequences. The company reached a $500M valuation.
When I came on as design consultant, the design infrastructure was what you typically find in a startup that had been engineering-led from the start: no coherent design system, no component library with any consistency, a product that worked but looked assembled rather than designed, and no process for involving design before implementation decisions were already made.
The Work
The first 90 days were triage and trust-building in equal measure. In developer-led organizations, the credibility problem for an incoming designer is real: you're asking people who've been shipping without you to slow down and work differently, and you have to earn that ask. The fastest path to trust was shipping something visible. I focused the early work on the highest-surface-area screens (the dashboard, the claim status view, the onboarding flow) because that's where inconsistency was most visible and where a coherent visual pass would have the most immediate impact on the product's perceived quality.
The longer-term work was the design system. In a product with real financial and legal stakes, visual inconsistency isn't just an aesthetic problem. It's a trust problem. If a user is about to let your software submit a tax claim on their behalf, the interface needs to signal precision and reliability. Inconsistent type scales, misaligned components, and improvised spacing patterns work against that. The system I built prioritized the components that touched the core user journey: the form patterns, the status indicators, the confirmation and error states.
On the process side, the goal was to get design into the conversation before engineering started building. That meant establishing a lightweight design review cadence that fit a fast-moving team, not a theoretical ideal process.
The Outcome
MainStreet raised significant capital and reached its $500M valuation during this period. The design foundation built during the engagement gave the product the visual coherence necessary to operate at that scale without the interface undermining the product's credibility.
