Conscious Patterns Inc. is a New York City-based health and wellness startup seeking its seed funding after successful trials with major corporate and healthcare customers. The company creates a product called TUNE, which is a physical hardware bed equipped with sensors, auditory, and motor functions to create an immersive meditative experience.
Rebuilding the platform
In order to have a compelling investment story, the company needed a refreshed product that worked more reliably than it had in the past. For years, customers had become accustomed to an unintuitive, slow, and rarely-working interface. The vision for this rewrite and rebrand was to make a simple, fast experience for customers that also worked for corporate customers. In doing so, it would aim to win business from a major corporate customer (unnamed here due to NDA restrictions; it is a technology company in the Fortune 100) and justify a seed investment to continue expanding to more customers.
Starting in January I joined the project. I initially took on product management duties – getting to know the project, its status, what was important to deliver next, and on what timeline we could realistically ship these items. As the scope became clearer, it also became obvious that we were understaffed and we expanded the team to 3 web engineers from 1, in addition to a hardware engineer. I ran the full hiring process for this team and continued to manage it for the duration of the project.
In addition to people management, I owned co-design and review of the new proposed full-stack architecture. Daily I also led development of the new frontend, built in NextJS and Tailwind.
With a strong, cohesive team in place we were able to deliver for Phase 1 trials at 1 office location with the major corporate customer in April. I was an integral part of customer success during this time where there were frequent need to clarify the hardware installation and initial set up processes. Since then, with a successful trial, that customer has decided to expand to a new phase of trials across nearly a dozen locations.