A wellness platform built around the person.
As Lead Product Designer with the PM, I owned discovery, the design system, and the web + mobile UI. A four-week MVP exposed the hard side — the professionals — so we pivoted from a directory to an app built around the person.
- Company
- Wepulse
- Segment
- Wellness
- Year
- 2019
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Stack
- Web · Mobile
What Wepulse was, and my role in it.
It started as a marketplace. The MVP told us to build something else.
Wepulse started as a two-sided wellness marketplace — connecting clients with health and wellness professionals. A four-week MVP taught us which side was hard: the professionals. Winning them into a model that asked them to change how they work was the wall.
So we made a call — stop depending on the hard side. What we shipped instead was an app built around a personal questionnaire that profiles each person and opens a custom way to explore their own health, rather than a directory brokering the client–professional relationship.
Holistic wellbeing, delivered through the hardest possible model.
Anxiety, depression, and sedentary lifestyles rise year over year, and the help is scattered — each professional works in a silo. Wepulse's thesis was that physical and mental health are inseparable, so wellbeing needs a holistic approach, not a directory of specialists. The model chosen to deliver it was a two-sided marketplace.
As Lead Product Designer working with the PM, I owned discovery, the design system, and the interface across web and mobile. Two-sided markets live or die on the hard side — we needed to find out which side that was before building the whole thing.
A one-week MVP, built to learn instead of to polish.
We ran an MVP for a few weeks instead of building the full platform: a web app to monitor a client's improvement and let professionals exchange information, designed in one week on Google Material patterns so we could learn instead of polish. We paired it with interviews.
The verdict split cleanly. Clients wanted it. Most professionals didn't — the product asked them to change how they worked for a payoff that only showed up long-term, a cost they wouldn't take on. The hard side was the supply side.
Two decisions that turned a stalled marketplace into a product.
Once the MVP exposed the supply side, the design work came down to two moves.
Ship a one-week MVP to find the hard side
The risky assumption was never demand — it was supply-side adoption. The fastest way to expose it was the cheapest build that could.
Make the person the owner of their own health
If the supply side won't change, the marketplace never clears — and no interface fixes a structural stall. So we stopped intermediating the client↔professional relationship and recentered the product on the individual, understood through a profile and behavior — the active party in their own health, not a passenger waiting to be matched.
A pivot that became a product.
The pivot became a product. We shipped a new app built around a personal questionnaire that profiles each person and opens up a custom way to explore their own health — content and paths tailored to them, instead of a directory waiting on a matched professional.
A month of testing redirected the product before we sank a year into a marketplace whose hard side had already said no. This was 2019 and early-stage — the honest win is a product shaped by evidence, not a growth chart.
Two lessons worth keeping.
A month of MVP work left two things I keep coming back to.
In a two-sided market, find the hard side first — then design so you depend on it less.
Ours was the professionals; the fix wasn't a better matching UI, it was needing them less.
"Change how you work for a payoff later" is a losing ask.
When your model hinges on someone's behavior change, that's the central risk, not a rollout detail.
“The honest win here isn't a growth chart — it's a product shaped by evidence, before we sank a year into a marketplace whose hard side had already said no.”