Elevate — AI-Powered Marketing Automation for Small Business
Elevate is an AI-powered marketing automation platform for small businesses — automated email, social scheduling, and customer-engagement workflows behind a four-step onboarding that configures everything. Designed end to end and developed with Claude, shipped as a live working prototype.
Role: Product Design & Prototyping
The Challenge
Marketing automation is where small business owners give up. The tools assume marketing literacy they don't have, front-load configuration before showing any value, and treat setup as an afterthought. The design question behind Elevate: can onboarding itself do the configuring — asking a handful of plain-language questions and letting AI translate the answers into a working setup?
The Approach
The flow was structured as three movements — questionnaire, guidance, configuration — compressed into a 3–5 step wizard with clear progress indicators. Each answer narrows what the product shows next: progressive disclosure keeps first-run complexity low, and the AI-guided configuration step turns the questionnaire's plain-language answers into concrete campaign settings the user can review rather than build.
- Questionnaire-driven personalization — the product configures itself from plain-language answers
- Multi-step wizard with visible progress, sized to 3–5 steps
- Progressive disclosure of features so the first run never shows the whole machine
- Responsive layout across desktop and mobile breakpoints
Design Exploration
The same onboarding flow was built in three distinct visual directions — neumorphism (soft shadows, tactile feel), glassmorphism (frosted translucency), and a bold gradient system — as live HTML comps, using the working prototype itself to compare how visual weight changes the perceived effort of the same steps.
Product Leadership
The product thinking behind Elevate spans a strategy memo (onboarding is the product, not a gate in front of it — the wizard configures the busywork instead of asking for marketing literacy first), a zero-to-one roadmap of four phases behind evidence gates (and the first gate is the first real owner, not a bigger demo), and a flywheel where the wizard configures an automation, the automation runs, the dashboard shows it working, and the owner adds the next one.
- Roadmap — gates not dates: four phases (prove the setup works, earn the second automation, let the dashboard sell the next tier, widen past the six automations), each opened only by named evidence — starting with six real owners finishing the wizard.
- The flywheel: the wizard configures an automation, the automation runs unattended, the dashboard shows it working, and that trust earns the next automation and the next pricing tier.
- Proven vs. assumed: the build record is deep — four pages, six automations, real Supabase SSO — but every dashboard number today is authored demo content, and no claim about a real owner is made until one runs the wizard.
What Shipped
A live landing page and complete onboarding prototype, built in HTML and Tailwind CSS and deployed on its own subdomain. Working prototypes over static mockups: every pattern in the flow can be clicked through, tested, and revised in production conditions.