Building A Business Acquisition Platform From Scratch

Clearly Acquired is a SaaS-Enabled SBA Business Acquisition Marketplace on a mission to build a better way for business buyers and intermediaries to connect, get verified, qualified, and execute deals in a high trust, data rich, technology-driven environment.

🗒️ Project Overview

🆘 The Problem

💡 Our Solution

🧭 User Journey

🎨 Design System

📲 Platform & Prototype

📑 Extras

✨ Results & Take Aways

My Primary Role:

Chief of User Experience

Time Frame:

Sept. 2023 - Present

Project Summary:

As Chief of User Experience, I led the end-to-end design process of the platform, from conceptualization to execution, ensuring high-quality deliverables that meet both user needs and business objectives, resulting in a modern, user-friendly platform experience.

Responsibilities:

Produced a platform User Journey to outline user actions and flows through various parts of the product.
Created a robust Design System to support the entire Product Design, from the beginning, to beta, to MVP, to taking the product to market.
Developed start-to-finish user flow through all the product features, through Designing Product Screens and interaction points.
Found ways to improve product adoption through creating custom onboarding experiences in Appcues.
Conducted User Research and Usability Testing to gather insights to inform design decisions.

🏆 Wins & Important Callouts:

Rapid Growth!

From Beta Launch through MVP we saw 500+ users come into the platform to explore the new product.

Great Feedback

After I implemented Appcues to get user feedback, we saw a 7.2 NPS from our userbase.

Launch-Speed

The product team hustled to get Beta in 3 months, and MVP in 6 months!

Founder

As a founder I forged the path for the platform design & user experience, from creating an account to creating a deal hub.

🗒️ Project Overview:

The purpose of this platform was to modernize the business acquisition process for brokers, buyers, and banks through a marketplace offering a wide variety of tools. This marketplace acts as a listing platform for businesses where buyers can search for listings based on category, industry, location, or price and then reach out to the broker that created the listing to proceed with an inquiry. From there the buyer can request access to the listing Data Room and view important confidential documents about the listing.

🆘 The Problem:

Business acquisition in its current state is challenging, frustrating, and incredibly time consuming. Brokers, buyers, and banks all need to work together for a business to be acquired successfully, and currently there are countless hurdles each of these user groups face. When interviewing each of these user groups we found that the current tools that are available lack an organized way to work through this process from start to finish.

User research informed us these primary issues:

❓ Listing quality is very inconsistent, and there is no quality control

❓ No timelines for various parts of the process

❓ Getting access to data rooms was very challenging and insecure.

❓ Searching for listings is time consuming and disorganized

❓ Buyers and brokers struggle to connect and communicate accordingly

💡 Our Solution:

That's why we came together to solve for these problems, and create a marketplace that will revolutionize business acquisition from start to finish. With our main focus on bringing Quality Listings and Verified Users into one platform, ensuring quality from both sides of the fence.

Our Goals for our marketplace solution:

✅ Create a user-friendly, simple onboarding process, for all user types

✅ Verify the user identity using Plaid to prevent bots or fake users

✅ Create an easy to use listing wizard for brokers to create listings

✅ Quality control the published to ensure they are legitimate

✅ Automate the Deal Hub process, and leverage DocuSign

✅ Easily add, edit, remove files in the Data Room

✅ Connect, chat, and collaborate all in one platform and space.

🧭 Platform User Journey:

I set out to build a comprehensive user journey for Clearly Acquired, a business acquisition platform, aimed at solving key pain points for brokers, buyers, and banks. By designing seamless workflows and intuitive interfaces, I tailored solutions to streamline deal-making, enhance transparency, and simplify the financing process. My goal was to create a cohesive experience that fostered collaboration and reduced friction across all parties involved in acquisitions.

🎨 Design System:

I developed a robust design system for the platform to ensure consistency and efficiency across all user interfaces. By creating a comprehensive library of reusable components and design patterns, I streamlined the UX design process, making it easier to scale and iterate. This system allowed the team to maintain a consistent visual language while enhancing user experience across the platform.

📲 The Platform:

I produced high-fidelity platform screens to address key UX interactions, user states, and the integration of new platform features. By focusing on detailed user flows and intuitive designs, I ensured that every interaction was seamless and visually aligned with the platform’s goals. These screens provided clarity for the engineer and stakeholders, streamlining the implementation of features while improving the overall user experience.

📲 Platform Prototype:

Interact with the prototype to explore the platform - simply click in the frame below to get started. A blue highlighted area will help supported you through the prototype.

📲 Want to view the live app?

Jump to Clearly Acquired

📑 Extras:

After our initial Beta Launch and working towards our sprint to MVP, I introduced Appcues as a solution to solve for user experience tips & tricks, banners, walkthroughs, and also to receive feedback from our users through an NPS score. This data proved valuable not only to enhance the user experience, but also helped our team to see important metrics about our user activity, where they may be running into issues, or what callouts they are reacting to vs. dismissing.

✨ Results & Takeaways:

Looking back on our successful launch of Clearly Acquired, which our amazing team built from the ground up, taking it from concept to beta and MVP, it's incredible to see how much we've achieved in just one year. Together, we’ve delivered key features like the Deal Hub and Listing Creation Wizard, setting the stage for something truly game-changing. But we’re just getting started—there are countless exciting features still to come as we gain momentum, listen to our users, and continue shaping the future of business acquisitions.