NFX THE BRIEF

The Project

The Brief is an online tool that helps founders connect with VCs in preparation for fundraising meetings. Startup founders fill out a form with relevant information about their company, such as team size, history, strategy, or pitch deck. VCs are targeted by stage and interest, and founders can track their progress via a private URL.

 

My Role

As the only designer of the firm, I worked closely with the product manager and lead engineer. We brainstormed different concepts, iterated quickly, and came up with ideas that we presented to one of the VC partners. I created flows, wireframes, and visual designs. With the input our the lead engineer, I also came up with some quick prototypes for the visualization of what we called the “network effect.”

 

Challenge

Partners at NFX were frequently contacted by startup founders via email. In most cases, relevant information about the stage, market, or previous investments was missing. Having to get back to tens or sometimes hundreds of emails every day was a big time commitment for the firm. So we (the product team) looked into ways to simplify life for our partners while adding value to startup founders. If we guide the founder through the process of gathering relevant information for one VC, they can reuse the same content for other meetings.

Discovery Phase

Since this was a product aimed at VCs as well as founders, we started by interviewing our in-house team. What are the things a VC needs to know about a company? What would make them consider investing? What are the pieces of information that founders often fail to provide? Is there a way to integrate best practices into the product, and to gently educate the founders? Finding a product name was part of the process, and we brainstormed several words that we later combined into the term “Company Brief” or just “The Brief.”

 

 

Knowing about the limited time startup founders have we wanted to make the product light-weight, easy to use, and with specific feedback on the progress. We wanted to show the value of a network to those founders who went through the process. NFXs value proposition is that a more extensive network with real connections will lead to a better match of VCs and founders and a smaller percentage of “wasted” meetings. The more information a founder is willing to share through The Brief, the more their network “lights up”.

Process

We started with a whiteboarding session, where we organized the different types of company information into meaningful groups. The partner in charge of the project was very hands-on during this phase, and his expertise in having advised and invested in startups helped tremendously. During this session, we also came up with ideas for illustrating the strength of the network effect. We made sure that the visual design was “on brand” and reflected the notion of a network effect. Below are a few different approaches for the illustration.

Final Outcome

The engineering team had started to build the app in conjunction with the design phase. Once everything was finalized, we collaborated on cleaning up the colors, font styles, and spacing. We launched Phase One, a simplified version of The Brief in early March 2018, only three months after our initial brainstorm session.