How Designers Can Launch a Venture Startup From 0 to 100 in a Month.

In my previous newsletter, I shared how designers now play a more critical role in the product development process. This week, I want to show you a practical example of how that works—and how my team accomplished it.

In just 30 days, our micro team of four launched our startup Baton, a DocuSign rival specifically for residential builders. Without red tape and AI, we went from a blank canvas to market-ready in a month. What traditionally would have consumed years of design and development at big companies like Google, we accomplished in weeks.

It completely transformed our roles and broke down silos between each other. Even our designer contributed code to shape the product without any challenges. 

This isn't just about creating products. Every industry is up for disruption and can shorten the time to market.

Don't believe me? Check out these startups with lean teams. Notice how they are all AI-focused and centered.

AI will influence the barriers that once protected legacy sectors' complexity, specialized knowledge, and high development costs. That's why we wanted to create a product that solved our pain problems of stakeholder miscommunication (see link in bio). We also needed one that translated well to the construction industry, which deals with loss of money due to poor project handling.

Here’s how we went from 0 to 100 with zero understanding of this market.

Construction, like law, has rigid codes and specialized language with no naming or document structure flexibility. So, our entire team needed to understand this specialized domain quickly and start building.

❌ Don't: Read through hundreds of pages of PDFs manually.

✅ Do: Drop all PDFs into AI with the prompt "Summarize all information and identify key market opportunities."

🚀 Results: Compressed weeks of research into hours of actionable insights.

❌ Don't: Create hypothetical user profiles based on guesswork.

✅ Do: Generate detailed personas with the prompt "Create user personas with problems, journeys, and pain points simply for non-designers."

🚀 Results: Data-driven user profiles that directly informed our product decisions.

We are working with a cold calling firm that utilizes AI to supercharge their workflow and help us secure our subscription-based clients. Here are some of the benefits we found so far:

👉 Voicemail Automation: AI can leave personalized voicemails in "my voice," eliminating repetitive manual voicemail recordings.

👉 Smarter Dialer: Automatically moves to next call if no answer after 30 seconds and can redial automatically based on logic without you having to open your phone.

If you're stuck in that big tech job, this is your calling to break out. Teams will only get smaller, which means more layoffs at prominent companies.

The teams that will dominate the next decade will not be the largest or best-funded. They will be the ones that effectively combine human creativity with AI amplification:

👉 Start small. Pick a specific pain point in an underserved industry.

👉 Leverage AI not just to move faster, but to completely reimagine what's possible.

The formula that allowed us to build a DocuSign rival for construction in 30 days can work for any industry still running on outdated systems.

What took years to launch a product is now weeks. The question isn't whether AI will transform your industry but whether you'll lead that transformation or play catch-up later.

Formerly known as Sven.

Co-founder of a venture studio called Studio.init() and Baton,  where I partner with startups by trading my creative skills for equity. After honing my craft at Google, Coinbase, and Milkroad, I combine my HCI background with my creativity to help people design and adapt to new technologies through psychology-driven methods. Check out the Loom Demo Video created during Baton development. Email me at [email protected] if you have questions.

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