Tool to growth engineA validated premise with no path to revenue
Appspotr is a no-code SaaS platform built on a compelling premise: anyone should be able to build an app, regardless of technical background. The product had validated that premise. It had users, features and ambition. What it lacked was the infrastructure to convert that ambition into revenue at scale.
My objective was to evolve it from a feature-rich tool into a high-conversion business engine, which meant operating at the intersection of product, growth and operations simultaneously.
Conversion and activationOne journey carried the whole funnel
First app creation was the highest-leverage point in the funnel. If a user successfully built their first app, even a simple one, conversion probability rose sharply. If they didn't, they churned. The entire growth strategy hinged on compressing that path.
I led the redesign of onboarding and the core creation flows, working from behaviour data to find where and why users abandoned. The changes were structural, not cosmetic: removing steps that added overhead without value, surfacing the right features at the right moment, and eliminating the friction that made a capable product feel complicated.
Removing friction in the first-app journey contributed to a 40% increase in paying customers.
Alongside onboarding I shipped end-to-end UX improvements driven by feature usage analysis. High-intent behaviours, the actions correlating most strongly with long-term retention, were identified and surfaced at the right lifecycle moment rather than buried in navigation. That produced a 30% increase in active engagement.
High time-to-value, onboarding drop-off before first app creation, low free-to-paid conversion. Capability was never the issue.
Friction removal in the critical first-app journey, behaviour-driven feature surfacing, and UX improvements grounded in usage data rather than assumption.
Making the syntax disappearThe no-code ceiling was data
Building apps with static content was accessible to anyone. Building apps that pulled from APIs, responded to input, or displayed dynamic data required users to write complex data syntax. That barrier stopped capable users from reaching their potential and stopped a wider segment from reaching power-user status at all.
I spearheaded the definition and product logic for a visual dynamic data syntax builder, replacing manual code entry with a tokenised visual system where users construct data logic through point-and-click rather than string manipulation.
The logic mapping was technically demanding. Backend data sources, APIs and CMS content, had to feel intuitive to a non-developer while still handling nested objects and conditional logic. Getting that abstraction right, powerful enough to be useful and simple enough to be accessible, was the product challenge at the heart of the feature.
Complex data binding required writing and debugging syntax strings. Non-technical users were blocked. Binding-error support tickets were high and hard to resolve.
Tokenised point-and-click logic construction. Guardrails prevented breaking changes. A wider segment could independently build data-driven applications.
The delivery engineGrowth is only sustainable if delivery keeps up
Engineering and design were operating in silos, a common early-stage pattern with a compounding cost: slow release cycles, inconsistent UI across client-facing products, and a handover process requiring significant rework at every pass. The product was accelerating and the infrastructure for building it was not.
I worked with engineering leads to overhaul the development workflow. The core change was standardisation: consistent handover, documented component logic, and a shared design language so engineering could build from the design layer without renegotiating intent on every ticket. Time-to-market for new features fell by 25%.
Output to outcomeThe most durable change wasn't a feature
Managing and mentoring a team of designers, I moved the team's focus from output metrics, screens shipped and tickets closed, to outcome metrics: conversion impact, engagement lift, time-to-market reduction. That reorientation changed what the team optimised for, and it changed the quality of the decisions they made independently.
The clearest test was the company-wide rebrand. A rebrand at speed, across an entire product suite, without disrupting an active roadmap is exactly the kind of initiative that exposes whether a team is operating reactively or strategically. I initiated and managed the product-wide redesign, ensuring aesthetic changes were coupled with functional improvements aligned to business priorities rather than a cosmetic reskin shipped under deadline pressure.