Building Brainfish

A look back at my first three and a half years as a product designer.

This isn’t a case study.

It’s a story about building my first startup, growing into a product designer, and everything I learned along the way.

This page is a reflection on my three and a half years at Brainfish. It isn’t about one feature or one launch. It’s about helping build a company from its earliest days, wearing more hats than I ever imagined, and slowly becoming the designer I always wanted to be.

🎨 Role

Founding Product Designer

⏳ Duration

3.5 years · Dec 2022 – May 2026

🔗 Site

Visit Brainfish

✨ Focus

Product, growth, brand & marketing

🌱 Every startup has a beginning

December 2022

I joined Brainfish as the company’s first and only designer. At the time the team consisted of a founder, a CTO, and me.

I didn’t come from a traditional design background. I studied Chemical Engineering, taught myself design through books, YouTube, articles, and years of practice. Brainfish became the place where all of that learning finally met the real world.

Looking back, I don’t think I understood how much those next three and a half years would change me.

🎨 Giving Brainfish a face

One of my earliest responsibilities wasn’t designing product screens. It was helping define what Brainfish should look and feel like.

Together we shaped the visual identity from the ground up: the logo, colors, typography, illustration style, website, and marketing assets. We wanted a brand that felt confident, modern, and a little different from the sea of generic SaaS products.

Field Note: Building a brand isn’t about making something beautiful. It’s about making something recognizable.

🤖 Designing AI experiences

The product evolved constantly, and so did my thinking.

When I joined Brainfish, AI products were rapidly changing. Every few months there was a new model, a new trend, or a new expectation from customers. Designing for AI meant constantly questioning assumptions instead of following established patterns.

One belief stayed with me throughout those years: AI didn’t have to look like a chatbot.

Instead of forcing every interaction into a conversation, we explored interfaces that felt like software first and AI second. Sometimes that meant cards, timelines, actions, forms, visual summaries, or contextual suggestions. The goal wasn’t to make AI feel magical. It was to make it genuinely useful.

Article Generation from Video

One of the features I’m most proud of designing is Article Generation.

When we spoke with customers, one problem came up repeatedly. Writing help articles was slow, repetitive, and almost always lagged behind the product. Even a small UI change meant someone had to revisit documentation, rewrite steps, capture new screenshots, and publish updates. For fast-moving startups, documentation was always playing catch-up.

I wanted the experience to feel almost unbelievable.

Instead of presenting users with another editor or AI prompt, we designed an experience where they could simply upload a screen recording of their product and let Brainfish do the heavy lifting. Watching a video transform into a structured help article with titles, steps, and explanations still feels like one of the most magical interactions I helped bring to life.

As the feature evolved, we expanded it beyond videos. The same workflow could generate articles from screenshots, Slack conversations, customer support chats, and existing documentation, making it useful no matter where product knowledge already existed.

One of my favourite moments was using the feature on my own work. I uploaded a recording of our internal branding guidelines presentation, and within minutes Brainfish generated a complete training guide for our help centre. It wasn’t a demo. It was something I genuinely used.

Designing this feature reminded me that the best AI experiences don’t ask users to work differently. They simply remove work altogether.

The Widget

The widget became one of the projects I spent the most time on.

What started as a fairly traditional support widget slowly evolved into something much richer. Instead of simply answering questions, it became a place where customers could discover articles, complete actions, browse media, submit forms, and seamlessly transition to human support when needed.

Across multiple redesigns we rethought navigation, layouts, hierarchy, mobile interactions, and how answers should be presented. Looking back, the evolution of the widget mirrors my own evolution as a designer.

Intent & Actions

Intent & Actions went through several completely different concepts before we landed on the final experience.

The first version relied heavily on drag-and-drop interactions. While flexible, it introduced unnecessary complexity. The next iteration experimented with a wizard flow that guided users through setup. Eventually we realized the simplest solution was also the strongest: a single-page experience where everything was visible, editable, and easy to understand.

That project taught me an important lesson. Good design isn’t about adding interactions. It’s about removing them until only the essential ones remain.

Insights

Insights is the project I’m most proud of, even though it never shipped.

It started with a simple observation. Traditional analytics are great at telling you what happened, but they’re far less useful at telling you what to do next.

I spent weeks exploring how AI could bridge that gap. Instead of dashboards full of charts, I imagined a workspace that highlighted knowledge gaps, surfaced recurring themes, identified feature requests, measured confidence, and suggested concrete next steps.

This project pushed me to think less about interface design and more about product strategy. Even though it never reached customers, it changed how I think about analytics, AI, and decision making, and many of those ideas still influence my work today.

Nudges

Not every feature becomes a success story, and I think that’s an important part of the journey.

Nudges explored proactive support by surfacing helpful messages before customers became frustrated. While the concept was promising, we learned that good timing and context mattered far more than simply displaying a message.

Some of my biggest lessons came from projects that didn’t fully meet expectations, and I’m just as proud to include those here because they shaped how I approach product design today.

🚀 Growing the product

Not every project deserves its own chapter.

Over three and a half years I designed dozens of features, improvements, experiments, and internal tools. Some were customer-facing launches, while others quietly improved workflows behind the scenes.

I worked on analytics, knowledge generation, article management, onboarding, health checks, search experiences, AI workflows, empty states, settings, notifications, dashboards, and countless small interactions that collectively shaped the product.

Looking back at this collection, what stands out isn’t any single feature. It’s the consistency of building, learning, shipping, gathering feedback, and doing it all again.

🧩 Building systems

As the product matured, consistency became just as important as shipping new features.

What started as a handful of reusable buttons slowly evolved into a complete design system. Over time I introduced typography scales, spacing rules, color tokens, reusable components, interaction patterns, illustrations, iconography, and documentation that helped keep the product cohesive.

Although it wasn’t implemented as a coded component library, it became a shared visual language for the entire team. Engineers could prototype ideas faster, new features felt familiar, and the product maintained a consistent identity as it grew.

🎪 Taking Brainfish into the real world

Brainfish wasn’t only experienced on screens.

As the company attended conferences across Australia and the United States, I had the opportunity to design booths, banners, apparel, printed material, and event experiences.

Watching the brand exist in physical spaces was one of the most rewarding moments of my time there.

✨ A gallery of favorites

Not everything I’m proud of lives inside the product.

Alongside product design, I also worked on launch campaigns, funding announcements, blog illustrations, social media graphics, Brainfish Wrapped, event material, sketches, and plenty of late-night desk photos documenting the process.

This gallery is a collection of those moments. Some are polished marketing visuals. Others are rough sketches or behind-the-scenes photos that remind me how the work actually happened.

Together they capture the creative side of building Brainfish beyond product screens.

❤️ Looking back

If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to share work earlier.

Some of my best ideas came from conversations, not pixels.

Brainfish taught me far more than interface design. It taught me how startups move, how products evolve, how brands grow, and how great teams solve problems together.

There will be future designers who redesign these screens, replace components, change colors, and rethink experiences.

And I love that.

Because underneath all those future iterations, there will always be a small piece of the foundation that our tiny team built together.

3.5 years. Thousands of frames. Hundreds of screens. Dozens of features. One brand.

My first startup. And the place where I truly became a product designer.