From pitch deck to paying customers in nineteen weeks
Zero-to-one product design and build for a climate analytics startup.
- Engagement
- 19 weeks
- Team
- 1 strategist, 1 designer, 2 engineers
- Stack
- Next.js, TypeScript, DuckDB
- Year
- 2024
Results
- From kickoff to first paying customer
- 19wk
- Scope cut before a line of code
- −33%
- Design partners onboarded at launch
- 8
Verdant had funding, two climate scientists, and a deck describing a platform that would take three years to build. Our first job was to find the smallest thing inside it that someone would pay for.
Cutting the roadmap by a third, on purpose
Eight interviews with prospective buyers surfaced one job everyone described in the same words: proving a supply chain emissions number to an auditor. Everything else on the roadmap was interesting, and none of it was urgent. We cut a third of the scope in week two.
They asked harder questions in week one than our last agency asked in a whole engagement. We cut a third of the scope and shipped early.
Designing for scrutiny
An auditor does not want a dashboard, they want a trail. Every number in the product traces back to its source data in two clicks, and every calculation shows its assumptions inline. That single decision shaped the whole interface and became Verdant's clearest differentiator in sales calls.
Verdant signed their first paying customer nineteen weeks after kickoff, with eight design partners live at launch.