Founders' Idea to Investor Magnet
Kristal.AI | Fintech | Singapore
Ideation + UX + Functional prototype
Founders' vision transformed into an investor magnet in just two months
When the founders of Kristal.AI, a fintech startup, needed a compelling way to pitch their business idea to investors, they turned to us. Instead of just a slide deck or a few statistics, we delivered an interactive interface that mirrored the final product. This is the success story of how Kristal.AI's robo advisory platform evolved into a trusted digital solution for safe and transparent investing.
- Dedicated UX team
- High-fidelity functional prototype
- Back-end integration-ready UI code
Background
Often, startup founders have a revolutionary idea that they believe can reshape the industry. However, presenting this idea effectively to investors requires more than just citing competitors' success stories; it demands a tangible and relevant approach.
Kristal.AI (formerly O2O Technologies), a fintech startup, recognized the potential in the success of Motif, an algorithm-driven, vertical-focused investing platform. They envisioned creating a digital investment platform that would empower retail investors to manage and track their investments, while allowing authorized retail advisors to oversee portfolios. As a startup, the founders needed to raise funds and sought an innovative solution to deliver a compelling pitch.
Conveying the business idea in the right form was crucial for Kristal.AI. They needed to demonstrate the platform's functionality, and potential impact convincingly to secure investor interest and support. This case study explores how we helped Kristal.AI achieve this goal, turning their vision into a powerful, investor-ready presentation.
Kristal
The key highlights of the digital investment application were:
- The use of KristalsTM. Each KristalsTM represented a customised portfolio with several investments within, comprising a combination of gold, stocks and ETFs.
- Each KristalsTM was graded based on its market risk factor, and investors could choose KristalsTM that matched their risk appetite.
- Individual investors could sign up and invest in KristalsTM of their choice. Advisors could create KristalsTM, and upon receiving permission from an investor, could manage their portfolio too.
In summary, Kristal.AI would serve as a digital platform for safe, transparent investing.
Key Challenges
- This was an evolving case and the development road was uncertain. Features were still being defined, and for most user journey studies, the references pointed to either industry leaders or early-stage low-fidelity mock-ups from the founders.
- There were no brand guidelines or identity design to latch the first gear.
- Building domain understanding in a short span of time was another uphill task for the UX team, because while the fintech solutions were made easy for customers to operate, the logic and process behind this stack were often quite complex.
"At UIConnect, we believe that time is of the essence in every offering. The sooner we deliver a presentable, functional model, the faster our clients can begin taking the prototype to investors, thus helping them scale. It is also important that we handle the design process end-to-end by coordinating with the client teams, so that our clients can focus on other aspects of their business in peace."
Parag Sapre
Head - UX delivery
UIConnect
UIConnect
Our Solution
Considering the Kristal.AI team’s background, challenges, and expectations, UIConnect suggested developing a functional prototype (sans database) that would not only capture business ideas and the user journey, but could later be integrated with the development team; something that could be demonstrated as a workable solution while highlighting its market potential to investors.
Our Approach
Through one-on-one meetings and video calls, our team set out to understand the essence of the business - industry trends, competition, expected product workflows, technical challenges, the end user’s persona, and delivery expectations.
The initial sketches provided by the founders were reviewed and a functional prototype was developed. Now the co-founders could navigate every page of the application / digital investing platform to help them validate ideas and share feedback. The code was developed from scratch. It would, in the future, also provide complete control to the developers in back-end integration. The Kristal.AI concept was visually defined and coded as a repetitive element, which could be replicated across the site at various stages of a user’s journey.
Success
- UIConnect converted an amorphous idea into a comprehensive, functional web application prototype within a span of three months – a process that typically takes several months to finish with in-house teams.
- The functional prototype provided visibility to co-founders. They could foresee and pre-empt challenges and opportunities before stepping on the development pedal.
- With coding and back-end integration, all the components required to build a working product were in place.
- Testing time was markedly reduced as the tech team could use the design as a starting point for coding, instead of the other way round.
- UIConnect also helped with brand and identity styles for the initial growth-rate trajectory, allowing the marketing team a glimpse of the final product.
Client Appreciation
"We had this innovative product idea that could be a game-changer in the investment-tech industry. We were looking for a digital design solution provider who could help us convert the idea into a visual form that we could take to our investors and stakeholders. UIConnect was referred to us by an industry acquaintance who had hired them in the past and was very happy with their design and consulting work.
We engaged UIConnect to help us with ideation, conceptualisation, design and UI-UX services for the production of our algorithm-based trading portal and the corporate branding of O2O Technologies."
We engaged UIConnect to help us with ideation, conceptualisation, design and UI-UX services for the production of our algorithm-based trading portal and the corporate branding of O2O Technologies."
Asheesh Chanda
Founder & CEO
O2O Technologies Pte Ltd, Singapore
O2O Technologies Pte Ltd, Singapore
