One product was serving incompatible jobs
Founders and investors wanted different data, entered with different agendas, and had different price points. Free users, PRO members, SVB clients, and enterprise buyers also required different access.
CipherBio case study · Life-sciences SaaS
Turning a free funding database into a paid intelligence product.
CipherBio had mapped more than $1.5 trillion in life-sciences funding, but the product was hard to use, impossible to monetize, and disconnected from its marketing. I connected product design, front-end development, pricing, analytics, and digital marketing so the product and its acquisition story worked as one system.
Subscription revenue
$0 → $200K+
2022 digital sales revenue after paid tiers and an aligned launch system.
Paid subscribers
600+
A free database became a paid intelligence product.
Cost per lead
$269 → $23
Reduced through a new digital acquisition strategy.
Marketing-sourced leads
90%
Share of leads attributed to digital marketing.
Problem: The situation
Great data. Broken product.
CipherBio had valuable data and eager users, but no pricing model, no usable mobile experience, no meaningful analytics, and no credible route from free access to paid utility.
The existing experience was difficult to navigate, slow and unreliable on mobile, and built around the structure of the database rather than the questions founders and investors brought to it. Tables were unreadable on smaller screens, dashboards lacked clear controls, and product releases were disconnected from onboarding, messaging, and acquisition.
Business stakes
Without a credible revenue path, CipherBio risked remaining a free funding database rather than becoming a defensible SaaS product.
Operating constraints
The work had a limited budget and operated inside SVB corporate rules, restricted tools, and slow production approvals. Design, development, testing, and marketing could not wait for a clean sequential process.
Approach: What I found
The interface was only one part of the problem.
The audit showed where the interface failed. Interviews, surveys, task analysis, analytics, stakeholder workshops, and functional demos revealed a larger system problem: product value, implementation, and acquisition were not aligned.
The profile model created work without value
Users did not want to maintain detailed profiles or consume long descriptions. Spotty editing weakened data quality while the most useful funding history remained buried.
Release and acquisition were separate systems
The product had no useful KPI framework or conversion path. SEO, landing pages, advertising, onboarding, pricing, and releases were telling different stories.
Approach: Jobs and pricing
Design access around distinct jobs, not database access.
Monetization could not be solved by putting a price on the existing experience. The offers had to correspond to different levels of utility for founders, investors, free users, SVB clients, and enterprise organizations.
- EvidenceResearch showed that founders and investors entered with different questions, required different data, and accepted different price points. There was also no upgrade path for existing free users.
- What changedBasic, PRO, and Enterprise tiers connected gated insights, dashboard depth, downloads, onboarding incentives, and organizational access to a credible paid model.
Approach: Evidence over sunk work
Remove work users would not do, even after we had designed it.
The first profile redesign did not produce the expected UX results. Observation, analytics, and user feedback showed that people did not want to maintain detailed profiles or read everything CipherBio could display. They wanted immediate intelligence, accurate data, and a faster route into the product.
- EvidenceCompany Profiles suffered from spotty user editing and low engagement. No one cared about the network graph, educational histories, or long company descriptions.
- What changedWe removed 70% of Company Profile content, removed user editing without complaints, emphasized verified stats and funding history, and replaced profile chores with immediate dashboard value.
Execution: Analytical controls
Replace clever dashboard interactions with explicit controls.
CipherBio's dashboards contained valuable clinical and funding data, but users could not always tell whether clicking a chart would filter it, what an export contained, or how to combine criteria. The visualization stack was working against the analytical task.
- EvidenceTesting exposed confusion with Tableau responsiveness, color, click-to-filter behavior, and exports. Highcharts performed better, but still needed the multi-select behavior users expected.
- What changedWe replaced Tableau dashboards with the more flexible Highcharts implementation, added visible filters and multi-select, improved responsive readability, and designed a curated CSV export.
Execution: One release system
Treat product, front end, testing, and acquisition as one system.
A new interface could not generate revenue if onboarding, pricing, landing pages, campaigns, and analytics told a different story. Design and development ran in parallel while research, functional demos, and marketing activity followed the release schedule.
- EvidenceThere were no useful KPIs, marketing was disconnected from the product, and corporate approvals made long sequential handoffs impractical. Functional VPN demos and feedback loops let the team test before UAT and production.
- What changedThe responsive Angular Material front end, onboarding, gated insights, pricing, technical SEO, landing pages, analytics, ads, webinars, and conversion messaging became one coordinated launch system.
What shipped
A connected product, front-end, and growth foundation.
The work moved from research and product decisions into a responsive application, paid access model, analytical workflows, testing practice, and measurable acquisition system.
Responsive front end
An Angular Material implementation optimized dense application pages from mobile through desktop.
Analytical workflows
Search, visible filters, multi-select dashboards, readable tables, and curated CSV exports.
Paid product system
Basic, PRO, and Enterprise access with onboarding, gating, trials, and upgrade paths.
Growth foundation
Technical SEO, analytics, landing pages, product-led content, campaigns, webinars, and feedback loops.
Impact
A paid product and a measurable acquisition engine.
$200K+
2022 digital sales revenue, from $0
600+
Paid subscribers
$23
LinkedIn cost per lead, down from $269
90%
Leads attributed to digital marketing
+62%
LinkedIn leads within three months of taking over SEO/SEM
42%
Share of all sales completed through digital channels
0.9%→2.76%
Google Ads click-through rate
+40%
Page-speed improvement
Reported company outcomes from 2022 following the multi-year redesign and growth work. Product design, front-end development, data, sales, customer service, engineering, QA, and marketing all contributed. The $1.5T+ figure describes the scale of funding data represented by the platform, not an outcome caused by this work.
What CipherBio proved
The reusable pattern.
The most durable lessons were not about a particular screen. They came from aligning value with users’ jobs, letting evidence change the product, making complexity explicit, and refusing to separate design from implementation and acquisition.
Price the job, not the database
Paid tiers became credible when access, depth, and price reflected distinct user decisions—not simply more records.
Evidence over sunk work
A finished feature is not valuable because it took time to build. Remove it when observation and usage show that it creates work instead of value.
Explicit beats clever
Dense analytical products need visible controls, interpretable states, and predictable exports more than novel interaction patterns.
One release system
Research, product decisions, front-end implementation, onboarding, analytics, and acquisition work better when they mature together.