ProcessFlow
B2B SaaS for interactive process management, Co-founder
Context
This was our first real product. We were a team of 3 co-founders: me as Design Engineer, a full-stack SWE, and a Product Manager. We started ProcessFlow in December 2024 and worked on it for about a year, incubated at Station F, the world's largest startup campus, in Paris. We were targeting ops teams at small and mid-sized businesses who needed to standardize their operations.
As the sole Design Engineer, I owned the entire visual and frontend architecture. I created the brand identity, built a comprehensive design system in Figma, and translated that into a pixel-perfect React/Tailwind frontend. I worked closely with our engineer and PM to bring the interactive application to life.
The problem
We saw teams stuck between two bad extremes: static, text-heavy documents (Notion, Confluence) that completely fail to capture branching logic, or infinite-canvas visual boards (Miro) that quickly devolve into overwhelming spaghetti diagrams. Documentation was always outdated, onboarding was slow, and all the knowledge lived in people's heads.
The challenge I was trying to solve from a design perspective: how do you let users build complex, conditional workflows ("If X happens, trigger Step Y") without causing cognitive overload or visual clutter, both when creating and when executing?
The solution
We built an interactive, node-based builder designed for clarity and ease of use. You could add conditional logic, embed the flows directly in Slack or Notion, and teams could standardize their operations in minutes instead of writing 10-page docs nobody reads.
Structured visual builder. Using React Flow, we built a canvas that let users map out branching steps intuitively. Instead of an unconstrained infinite canvas, we implemented explicit, guided UI dropdowns for adding steps, delays, and conditional logic. The goal was always: complex workflows, zero visual chaos.
Design-to-code pipeline. I designed every single state and interaction in Figma first, then exported our design system's color and typography tokens as JSON to create a rigid, highly reusable Tailwind component library within our Next.js architecture. This gave us strict visual consistency from design to production. No drift, no improvisation in code.
Cross-functional velocity. Having the entire design system and all edge-case screens mapped out in Figma upfront meant our engineering team could ship features incredibly fast. The gap between "here's the design" and "it's live" was almost nothing.
Outcomes
We got 70 users and got accepted into the 42 incubator program at Station F. But we never generated revenue.
By July 2025, I was running discovery calls (too late) and got invited by a CEO to visit their company in San Francisco to observe their operations onsite. During that visit, I discovered their actual pain point wasn't SOP documentation at all, it was sales team training. We immediately paused ProcessFlow and built them a custom AI Sales Training pilot — Impulsion — in just 10 days.
After two months of pilot negotiations, the SF company delayed implementation by six months due to internal timing. That's when it hit us: B2B sales cycles are grueling, and as young founders without an established corporate network, closing enterprise deals was nearly impossible. We decided to sunset our B2B efforts and pivot to B2C, which eventually became Lume.
Retrospective
On the craft side, my workflow between Figma and React was highly efficient. Designing screens upfront massively accelerated our development speed. That part worked beautifully.
But as a team, we fell into the classic startup trap: we built a complex tool based on our own assumptions rather than confirmed market demand. We thought we understood the problem because it seemed obvious, but we never properly validated it with real users before building. We over-engineered the interactive builder before checking if companies were willing to pay for it. People signed up and played with it, but nobody needed it badly enough to open their wallet.
I also realized that B2B SaaS is uniquely hostile to young, first-time founders without an existing corporate network. Enterprises are inherently risk-averse. They don't want to be the guinea pig for an unproven startup. Cold outreach barely works. You need warm intros.
Learnings
Design engineering fundamentals. This project was my forge. It solidified my ability to own the entire frontend lifecycle: from Figma tokens to React components, managing GitHub workflows, and collaborating tightly with backend engineers. These technical skills became the foundation for everything I built after.
Validate before you build. No matter how beautiful the UI or how clean the architecture, you must validate the problem with the target audience first. We should have done 50+ discovery calls before writing a single line of code.
Monetize the problem, not the code. Sell the solution before building the product. If necessary, sell services or manual consulting to validate the pain point before writing a single line of code. If I started over, I'd focus on distribution first (getting access to the right people) and only then figure out what to build for them.