Hire & fundraise without a lawyer
Creating a guided, TurboTax-like experience for founders to handle equity workflows.
Overview
Pulley lets you do E2E hiring on the platform – but we didn't yet connect all the pieces together.
Founders want a guided, yet flexible experience like TurboTax.
Problem
Why startups feel like they need lawyers to hire and fundraise:
- Most founders (especially new founders) don't know what is needed to actually hire and fundraise
- Few know that options need to be board-approved before being issued
- Even fewer understand that SAFEs need to be board-approved before they can be issued
- Most founders don't have standard employment agreement templates (unlike SAFEs, which are created and blessed by YC), and therefore rely on their law firms to create them
Design process
Worked with a PM (and former founder) to map out the actual tasks that founders need to do when they hire and fundraise.
An early iteration changed too many things and was too linear. We iterated to find the right balance of guidance and flexibility.
I introduced a new component to accommodate various use cases specific to Pulley.
Competitive analysis
Looked into legalTech tools like IronClad which manages similar legal workflows.
Challenges
Pulley is going through a re-org, so engineers are shifting around. Project getting paused, unpaused, paused...
Certain dependencies or pieces for a workflow are missing.
Working backwards to implement foundational pieces to enable this UX.
Learnings
Planning and splitting out the project into phases has been great for momentum.