Canaree Finance — full case study

Designed a financial modelling SaaS for startups and scale-ups, helping founders create investor-ready models in minutes, from first research through to launch and first paying customers.

Client: Canaree

Category: Fintech

Designed a financial modelling SaaS for startups and scale-ups, helping founders create investor-ready models in minutes, from first research through to launch and first paying customers.

Metric: Launched, first paying customers

Role: UX and UI Engineer

Duration: 2019 to 2021

Founders (finance SMEs), developers, marketing, me

Startups and scale-ups need financial models to show investors how they will generate revenue, build a team and budget expenses. Traditionally that means spreadsheets, with a huge learning curve, and Canaree spotted the gap for something better.

Founders and CEOs, often without a finance background and usually pre-CFO, needed to become investment-ready and share credible financial models with investors, without spending weeks learning spreadsheet modelling.

• The goal was to speed up building a model while simplifying the workflow.
• Ready-made templates for SaaS, Marketplace and E-commerce plus flexible pricing models let users create theirs in minutes.
• Smarter than plain budgeting software: automatic financial advice benchmarked against industry standards.
• I also designed, built and maintained the marketing website on Webflow, running growth experiments with the marketing team.

Discovery began with the finance experts and SMEs on the project, who were also the founders. I then ran user interviews and contextual enquiries with CEOs, COOs and founders, covering people who had built models themselves and people who had them built for them, asking non-leading questions and reading non-verbal behaviour.

• Users split into two camps: those who built models themselves and those who had a finance expert do it.
• Walking through current workflows surfaced the real pain points.
• The tasks that mattered most were quickly creating a model, education, and financial advice.
• Four guiding principles emerged: fast, educational, flexible and transparent.

We aligned user needs with Canaree's business goals into a product roadmap and a conceptual prototype. Personas, empathy maps and per-persona problem statements framed the work; data analysis and user flows followed, with sketches pressure-tested for feasibility alongside the developers and product owner before lo-fi wireframes in Sketch.

A guided, template-driven flow that replaces the spreadsheet, with dashboards and automated advice benchmarking a founder's numbers against industry standards. A comprehensive style guide in Zeroheight became the single source of truth, with behavioural rules for tables, numbers, charts and responsiveness.

• Lo-fi and hi-fi prototypes tested with users through Maze, capturing qualitative and quantitative data.
• Each testing round was turned into concrete design improvements.
• A comprehensive style guide documented in Zeroheight for design and engineering.
• The marketing website designed, built and maintained on Webflow.

• The product launched successfully.
• Canaree won its first paying customers.

User research to discover needs and define the right problems, a feature set and priorities that directly impact business KPIs, and experiences that are both useful and beautiful. Working with the development team taught me what it really takes to build a feature from a design.

I would have run more Maze rounds on the advice features. The benchmarking concept tested well, but its explanations deserved deeper usability work.