I worked with BundleIQ as an external Product & Design Lead during a critical pivot moment, helping move the company from a stalled note-taking app into an early AI-native knowledge intelligence platform through product strategy, MVP definition, and a new marketing website.
I worked closely with Nicholas Mohnacky and the BundleIQ team, including backend developers, frontend developers, junior designers, and copywriting support. This was a small team working under real startup pressure, and the success of the project depended on close collaboration between product, design, engineering, and leadership.
BundleIQ started as a note-taking and productivity app.
The product was built. The backend worked. People were using it. But there was no strong business engine behind it yet.
The team was facing the kind of problem many startups hit after building the first version: the product existed, but the market signal was not strong enough. Note-taking was already crowded, engagement was difficult to grow, and the company needed a clearer reason to exist.
After conversations with the founder and lead investor, the direction became clear: BundleIQ needed to pivot.
The opportunity was not to make a better notes app.
The opportunity was to use AI to help people connect scattered knowledge across tools, documents, emails, research, and internal resources.
This was 2020, before AI product patterns were obvious, before every SaaS product had an AI assistant, and before "second brain" became a mainstream product category. That made the work exciting, but also difficult. We were not just designing screens. We were helping define what the product should become.
We approached the project through a focused discovery and strategy process.
The goal was to understand where the original product was breaking down, what users were really trying to manage, and where AI could create a meaningful shift in the experience.
The insight was simple: people did not need another place to store information. They needed help making sense of the information they already had.
That changed the direction of the product.
Instead of positioning BundleIQ as a note-taking app, we reframed it around knowledge intelligence: a product that could connect information, surface context, and help users move faster through research and decision-making.
From there, I helped shape the new product direction, MVP scope, naming, pricing structure, brand story, and core user experience.
The work sat somewhere between product strategy, UX strategy, and hands-on product design. I was not coming in to decorate an existing idea. I was helping the team find the next version of the business.
The MVP centered on an early AI-powered experience built around one of the first OpenAI GPT integrations we had access to use.
The key product idea was a Chrome extension that lived inside Gmail and connected the user's existing workflow with BundleIQ's knowledge layer.
Instead of forcing people to open another app, the extension brought contextual intelligence into the places where they were already working.
The experience allowed users to surface relevant information from notes, research, emails, and external sources, including content like Wikipedia, directly in context.
I worked closely with the developers to define and design the prototype, including the UX/UI, interaction model, enrollment flow, and product logic needed to make the concept understandable.
We also built a live prototype in code to test usability, explore micro-interactions, and support frontend implementation.
Alongside the product work, I designed the new marketing website and helped translate the product strategy into a clearer go-to-market story. The website had to explain a new category of product before the market had common language for it.
That was one of the biggest design challenges: making early AI feel useful, understandable, and human.
I worked closely with Nicholas Mohnacky and the BundleIQ team, including backend developers, frontend developers, junior designers, and copywriting support. This was a small team working under real startup pressure, and the success of the project depended on close collaboration between product, design, engineering, and leadership.
The work helped BundleIQ move from a stalled productivity app into a clearer AI-native product direction.
With the new positioning, MVP concept, brand story, prototype, and website in place, the company was able to present a stronger vision to investors, attract renewed interest, extend runway, and bring in new talent for the next phase of development.
The team continued building the AI engine and moved deeper into the knowledge intelligence space.
I would not frame this as a simple redesign. The real result was strategic momentum.
BundleIQ had a sharper story, a more differentiated product direction, and a working MVP concept that connected product, AI, business strategy, and user experience.
BundleIQ was one of my earliest AI-native product strategy projects.
Before AI became the default conversation in tech, we were already exploring how GPT could be used inside a real workflow to help people manage and connect knowledge.
The project reinforced something that has become central to my work: good product design is not just about screens. It is about finding direction when the business is unclear, translating emerging technology into human value, and helping teams move from ambiguity to something they can build, explain, test, and fund.
For BundleIQ, that meant helping turn a note-taking app with limited traction into a more ambitious AI knowledge platform.
For me, it became an early example of the kind of work I care about most: strategy, product, design, technology, and execution moving together.
