LettuceConsumer Fintech
All-in-one
tax and accounting
platform for
solopreneurs
A year-long partnership with Lettuce to take a beautiful-but-brittle MVP and turn it into a banking product solo-entrepreneurs actually trust with their money — and come back to every Monday morning.
Backed by
decades of doing
the unglamorous work.
My job wasn't to make it pretty. It was to figure out why their best prospects signed up, tried the product once, and never came back. Then fix that — everywhere it was broken — before we shipped a single new pixel.
We spent the first six weeks watching customers use the thing on calls, pulling apart the onboarding funnel, and writing a product principles doc the whole company now cites by number. Only then did we touch the UI.
Great
sign-up rate.
Nobody stayed.
The waitlist was a vanity number. People wanted this productto exist for them — but the product we were shipping didn't respect the mess of actually running a side business.
Onboarding asked for seven things it didn't need yet.
We were collecting EIN, LLC documents, and a tax classification before the user had even seen the dashboard. Drop-off hit 61% at the document-upload step.
"Business" and "personal" were modeled as two apps.
Our users don't separate their lives that cleanly. A freelance photographer uses the same Square reader, same card, same bank account. The UI kept forcing a decision nobody wanted to make.
Nothing on screen answered "did I make money this week?"
The home screen showed balance and a transactions list — two things a user can get from any bank. The job that brought them to Lettuce was invisible.
Support tickets doubled as product feedback, ignored.
Seven months of support transcripts had never been read by design or product. The same five complaints showed up in 38% of tickets.
One surface.
Three principles.
No more drift.
Show the money first.
Home screen now opens on a single number: net-to-owner for the period. Everything else — transactions, invoices, tax estimate — collapses underneath it. We killed the dual-account split on day one.
Collect later, never earlier.
Onboarding now requires only an email and a debit card. Entity type, EIN, and tax docs are deferred until the user tries a feature that legitimately needs them — and always inline, never as a wall.
Treat support tickets as briefs.
We set up a weekly 30-minute standing review where design, PM, and CX read new tickets together. Nine of the last year's shipped features came directly out of that meeting — not a roadmap.
Three minutes
on the redesign.
"What changed, why it changed, and what I'd do differently — a honest tour of the v2 flows."
Drawings, specs,
and the occasional
argument on glass.
Numbers that
moved the board
— and a quieter win.
"Won pushed us past the work we were comfortable shipping. The product we have now is the one we always said we were building — we just didn't know how."
After launch, day-7 return rate moved from 3.1% to 39% and has held there for eleven weeks. Time-to-first-transaction dropped from 4 days to under 20 minutes.
The quieter win: the team now runs their own ticket review every Monday without me. That is the work I was actually there to do.
Next case —
Aris — Your AI life coach
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