The Lemonade Traders
web app.

The Lemonade Traders is a startup I co-founded with two others in 2016. The platform was designed to help other startups and SMEs negotiate and create their own legally binding business agreements online, without having to turn to a lawyer.

Our aim was to reduce the legal costs for small businesses and assist founders and partners in strengthening their relationships and formalising their business agreements, both in good times and bad. All this while educating them about the process, highlighting essential considerations for their negotiations, and making it enjoyable along the way.

As the Product Designer, I was responsible for leading the research, shaping the product, prototyping, as well as the UX, UI and branding.

Bootstrapping a startup comes with a myriad of challenges. My two Co-Founders, the originators of the idea, and I were all first-time founders.

You write a book about what we didn't know and what we learned along the way.

Looking back, the central challenges of the endeavour were:

• ‍Navigating the friction of creating a new product category.
• Building a functional product without a technical Co-Founder.
• Effectively conveying the platform's value to potential customers and establishing an effective marketing funnel.

In the end, we developed a functional and user-friendly platform that provided a variety of essential business agreements:

• NDAs
• MOUs
• Co-Founder Agreements
• Shareholder Agreements
• Equity for Expertise Agreements

We received overwhelmingly positive feedback from users. However, we found it challenging to effectively market the platform and convey the value we had created.

Ultimately, we lacked the stamina to pursue the necessary pivots that would have led us to product-market fit.

Diving deep into the world of building a SaaS application from scratch was a learning curve.

Here are some of the most challenging lessons I learned as a Co-Founder:

• You need to test (repeatedly as you refine your product) with people you don’t know, your existing network will pull punches.
• Finding the quickest path to putting a working MVP in customers hands is the only way to truly understand if you have created real customer value.
• Big challenges are always present; they simply evolve over time.
• It's essential to foster your community, even before you have a product to offer.
• To deliver genuine value to customers, you must consistently and critically challenge your core assumptions.