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01
Background
01
Deal marketing
Where founders promote their raise to the right audience
02
Investor matching
Where founders and investors find the right fit with each other
03
My focus
Investor engagement tracking
Managing outreach and moving deals forward. My two products sit here: IM for founders, Track for bankers.
My role
I joined in 2022 as the platform entered beta with almost no design foundation, and led design on IM and Track over the next ~16 months, from discovery to release. My focus was Engagement tracking, where founders manage outreach and move deals forward after the first connection.
The outcome
The team's bet was to take fundraising from a high-touch service to a self-serve product, digitizing 11 of 14 steps while preserving the 3 moments where human relationships drive the most value. In its first year, Capital Connect drove $100M+ in capital raised across 17 fundraises, onboarding 1000+ investors and 800+ companies.
Founder
Wants to find the right investors and engage with them efficiently
Banker
Connect companies with the right investors and guide deals forward
Investor
Stay informed on opportunities and evaluate them quickly
02
Research
User interviews
Series A and B, with bankers as research leads
Cross-functional sessions
PMs. engineers, legals — aligned on scope before commit
Method 01
Shadowing & user interviews
Sat with founders and bankers through a live raise, mapping their real workflow against industry norms.
Method 02
Priority mapping
We mapped each job by impact and time burden, surfacing where to start.
Method 03
Requirements & constraints gathering
Brought PM, engineering, and design together early to align on goals, scope, and limits before building.
Sarah Johnson
Founder of Northstar Finance
San Francisco
PST
"I'm raising while running the company. I can't afford to lose track of who's interested and what comes next."
Goal
Find and target the right fintech investors and keep every conversation moving toward a close.
Frustration
Outreach lives across email and spreadsheets, it's difficult to navigate fund raising process. Cold intros go nowhere, and progress is impossible to see at a glance.
Need
One place to track every investor, their interest, and the next step, with J.P. Morgan bankers' expertise when she needs it.
Marcus Reid
Banker of J.P. Morgan
New York City
EST
"I want my time where it moves a deal forward, with founders who need an intro or a push to close."
Goal
Guide each deal forward at the key moments, collaborating with founders in one shared flow instead of working in parallel.
Frustration
Routing everything through him recreates the bottleneck. He becomes the middleman for updates founders could manage on their own.
Need
A shared workspace where founders run their own outreach, and he steps in where his network and judgment matter.
Tools
Investor research
Data room
Communication
03
Problem and solution
04
Outcome
Founder on IM
Find the right investors and build a shortlist
Every investor is scored against the deal profile and filtered by industry, check size, and fit.
Track every investor in one view
Shortlisted investors land in a single view of outreach and interest, with status, history, and last contact in one place. Collapse for firm-level status, or expand to act on individual contacts.
Invite investors without starting from scratch
Reach out individually or in bulk. Guided templates give founders a starting draft, so outreach never begins from a blank page.
Banker on Track
Both sides working from the same picture
Each founder gets a dedicated Track. The banker sees the full investor list with scores, status, outreach, and meeting progress, mirroring what the founder works from so both sides stay on the same picture.
Surface what needs attention
A side panel pulls together the tasks, pending invites, and follow-ups tied to each firm, so the next action is always clear without digging through the list.
Step in on warm intros
When a founder requests a warm introduction, it reaches the banker as an actionable request. The banker reviews the match and either makes the introduction or declines, stepping in only where their network moves the deal forward.
05
Challenge
Current workflow
Founders and bankers had run on the same spreadsheet template for decades, and their time is scarce. The hard part was not building a better tool. It was getting them to give up a familiar workflow for a new one, willingly.
The tension
Push too hard on a redesign and you disrupt active deals. Go too soft and you ship a digital spreadsheet.
01
Get user started fast
Match the columns and filters users already knew, so the tool felt familiar before it felt different.
What was shipped
Spreadsheet-familiar interface
Same columns and filters
02
Make progress visible
Introduce firm and individual status, so users can see where each relationship stands.
What was shipped
Firm and individual status
Outreach status bar
03
Automate manual work
Connect the steps users had been doing by hand, now that the tool had earned its place.
What was shipped
One-click direct intro
Status automation
Task side panel
06
Handoff
Handoff without guesswork
I specified every state and interaction up front, so the build was a shared reference instead of a back-and-forth. By making the spec the single source of truth, I gave engineers, PMs, and design one place to align, so decisions got made once, not relitigated.
Scaled from product to platform
I resolved them in my product and pushed the findings up as scalable patterns and tokens, so a decision made once could hold across the platform.
07
Impact
Raised across 17 live fundraises
Companies onboarded
VCs and institutional investors
