How Strategic Design Drives Funding, Revenue, and Growth with Lena Levine
TechXY Turbo, Episode 11
Lena Levine is the CEO of Forcoda and Managing Partner at Forcoda Ventures.
Over the past fifteen years, she’s built a reputation for helping both startups and enterprise companies design, launch, and scale software products that customers love and investors fund. She’s worked with major brands including Oral-B, Shake Shack, Central Park Conservancy, Chobani, and M&T Bank.
Today, through Forcoda Ventures, Lena focuses on early- and growth-stage startups looking to enter the U.S. market, raise capital, and scale, connecting tech ecosystems between the United States and Australia.
Listen to “How Strategic Design Drives Funding, Revenue, and Growth” below, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts. The episode transcript is shared below the embed.
TechXY Turbo - Podcast Transcript - (E11)
Frank: Welcome to another episode of TechXY Turbo. My name is Frank Gullo and I am your host.
On this episode of TechXY Turbo, we’re joined by
Lena Levine is the CEO of Forcoda and Managing Partner at Forcoda Ventures.
Over the past fifteen years, she’s built a reputation for helping both startups and enterprise companies design, launch, and scale software products that customers love and investors fund. She’s worked with major brands including Oral-B, Shake Shack, Central Park Conservancy, Chobani, and M&T Bank.
Today, through Forcoda Ventures, Lena focuses on early- and growth-stage startups looking to enter the U.S. market, raise capital, and scale, connecting tech ecosystems between the United States and Australia.
Lena, it’s so great to have you on the program. Thank you for joining us all the way from Australia. How are you doing today?
Lena: Thank you, Frank. I’m excited to be here doing well.
Frank: Great. As you know, as you know, TechXY is a tech podcast, so let's start with your tech backstory. You've built a career spanning web development, UX/UI design, full-stack development, and now strategic product development. How did you first get into technology, and how has your relationship with it evolved from building e-commerce sites to leading enterprise software projects for Fortune 500 companies?
Lena: Thank you. That’s a great question. My background is in technology. I come from a family of engineers, I was born into tech. I started learning to code when I was 12 with Microsoft Basic, and then when in Russia, I got a Master’s of Computer Science degree, and after when I moved to the US in 2009, I studied digital media and right out of college I got a job at Yahoo in Western Europe, which was where I learned that a corporate career is not for me.
I shifted into more work with smaller businesses. I was working for a small web dev studio, and from there I shifted into doing my own thing through freelance and consulting. This is where I discovered passion working directly with businesses, solving complex design and technical problems, and having that direct impact on customer businesses and helping them grow.
I found this extremely rewarding, and from that point, that passion turned into full time business called Forcoda, which I’ve been running for the last 11 years, and which evolved from me being a solo entrepreneur to now having a team of designers, developers, project managers. We have an amazing CTO with 30 years of experience in machine learning and AI.
So it’s been a really amazing journey and through all that. Experience with running a business. I had the pleasure of working with national level brands like Oral-B, Shake Shack, Central Park Bank and various technology startups that we help too. We help the founders take their ideas and turn them into the functional, fully functional products that they used to raise funding and scale.
Scale businesses, hire the teams, and turn out successful products, which I’m happy to be a part of their success journey. This year we also launched the venture arm of our business called Forcoda Ventures, which I’m doing with my business partner Gozel. This is where we leverage our expertise in technology, go to market strategy, and scaling businesses internationally to help startups in the US scale. We are also working with international startups such as in Australian markets.
This is where I’m right now at the moment, and we’re helping them to enter the US market and expand. They establish the presence and raise money from US investors.
Frank: Thanks so much for that. Sounds like a technology and global journey for you.
Lena: That’s part of my plan of taking over the world.
Frank: Excellent. Excellent. You specialize in full-stack development for SaaS and mobile applications. What's your technology stack look like for typical projects? And how do you make technology decisions that balance speed to market, scalability, and long-term maintainability, especially for non-technical founders who don't understand the tradeoffs?
Lena: It really depends on the type of the project. If we are working on complex enterprise level solutions, let’s say web applications, our tech stack is React and Node.js with AWS or Google Cloud on the backend. If we’re working with startups that look to validate ideas quickly, this is one of the areas that we specialize in helping startups build something that customers want and need.
What we’re currently using on that side, for the first validation, we switch to using no code tools to speed up the development time and add more efficiency to our processes. For quick MVP validation, we’ve been using tools like Rapid for mobile app development and Lovable for web based apps to reduce the development time on MVPs from several months to just several weeks.
Frank: It’s a great answer and you’ve said a lot there, so I want to unpack in some future questions. So thank you for that. Your clients have secured over millions in funding through campaigns grounded in your strategic and design frameworks. What's the connection between great UX/UI design and fundraising success? What are investors actually looking for when they evaluate product design?
Lena: Great design is not just beautiful picture. Like many people may think design goes beyond the looks, but it also about how users interact with application, the product, whether it’s easy to use, whether it makes sense to the users because at the end of the day, that’s the key. Key components and key factors can distinguish good or bad products from a great one.
Because if the product that customers are using and trying for the first time, if it’s confusing, if things are not working as expected, or, you know, buttons in the wrong places, if users have a bad and confusing experience, they might not return to the product, which is crucial for early stage founders that are trying to get those customers to try and use the products.
So making sure that founders and startups focusing on great design from day one is extremely important these days. With the advent of AI tools and tools like Figma with powerful design capabilities, companies really have no excuse to not focus on great design. That’s one of the things that investors are interested in.
They want to see how well a product is performing, how well users are adapting it, whether they are using it daily, spending a lot of time on the application. And besides user adoption rate, investors are also focusing on growth rate. How quickly how many users join the platform on a daily basis and how much revenue the platform is generating, which again starts from that the design and user experience. Because if because if users are not sticking to the platform, then all the other metrics are going to fall off as well.
Frank: You said revenue, that’s a great term. I hear that a lot. And you shared a case study where the client was approximately at $2 a month, and you show them going to tens of thousands and annual recurring revenue per customer. So what tech, what design changes enabled that kind of revenue leap. And what was broken before you introduced the change?
Lena: With this client, we helped them repositioning their business model and identifying the right customers for them for their platform. Initially when they built their app, they were focusing on individual users. So it was a direct to consumer platform that was focusing on aging populations, with the goal of helping them to provide additional value and services to help end of the life transition.
As we conducted extensive customer interviews and market research, we spoke with people in the healthcare industry, people within that aging population, caregivers, family members only to discover that even though the problem exists in the market, actual users and the potential customers do not want to admit to themselves that there is a problem.
That made it very difficult for for the business to scale and acquire potential customers. What we’ve done, we repositioned their product to be more aligned with insurance companies that also see the problem with aging population, where the cost of healthcare is going up because people might not be going to the doctor’s as often.
Or maybe doctors don’t always even understand the needs of the of that demographic. By partnering up with insurance companies and providing the same product and services, we were able to deliver the product through the hands of the end users, through the trusted channels like insurance companies that people already knew and trusted, which helped to position the business model from, switching to business to business B2B and increasing that sales size from over the license from just a couple dollars per month to selling platform over $100,000 in licenses per year.
Frank: I mean, I think that’s a great illustrative example. Sounds like design meets research meets business strategy. You also suggest at times limiting initial investment in software development, which goes against some conventional startup wisdom. Walk us through this approach. How do you help founders validate product-market fit and even achieve pre-sales before writing production code?
Lena: That’s another great question. That’s something, now that I’m in Australia, I see differences in how startups are built and scaled in the US versus Australia, which is a different market with very different dynamics and how investors and companies approach it.
For example, one of the challenges in Australia for startups is to secure early stage funding and that forces them to really do a great job at building solid business models, validate the ideas and build the solid businesses from day one because otherwise they cannot reach that profitability level or secure funding down the line.
Whereas in the US we have more investors with high tolerance for risk who are more willing to throw money at the startup and see what sticks. And see which company becomes successful. Which leads to what I notice in Australia, companies having more well-defined business models by the time they reach let’s say 10 million in annual revenue.
So that’s a great indicator. And a very well established business model. And a company around it. And that’s what goes goes to your question where startups that try to be lean in the beginning, as they build their businesses, build their software, it forces them without spending too much money on many things.
It forces them to focus on solving the most important things and be very strategic. How they find customers, giving feedback, iterating and not trying to do too many things at once. That’s why it maybe it may seem counterproductive when I say that you want to go lean in the beginning, but it actually create practice, because it allows being in those constraints.
Founders can actually focus on solving the right things, and once they have the traction, once they have confirmation that the product that they’re building is actually, there is a great demand for it, then that’s when it makes sense to put more fuel in the fire to add funding to start scaling it faster.
Frank: Makes sense. Thank you. I want to go back to one of your early answers. Starting with MVPs, first for the people who may not know fully what that is, someone who’s maybe thinking of starting a tech startup, can you explain what an MVP is?
And then, the question: you've achieved success in pre-sales for MVPs before full development. How does the design process itself become a market validation tool? What technologies or methods do you use to test whether people will actually pay for a product before it's fully built?
Lena: MVP stands for the Minimum Viable product. And typically what that is, it’s the set of few core features that founders and the companies build out. To test the assumption, whether there is a need for their product, and use the MVP to make it cost and time effective, so that way they can get it into the hands of customers quickly with the goal of getting feedback, testing different assumptions (whether customers want to pay for it, whether the product is solving a real customer problem).
Once those assumptions are validated, it’s safer for startups to invest more money to continue scaling it. And whether they buy more features, or add more money to sales and marketing to onboard more customers.
Frank: What tech or methods do you use to test whether people investors will actually pay for a product before it’s fully built?
Lena: The best way is to go to people and ask for sale. Whether you have an MVP that’s functional, or whether you have a proof of concept (that could be from a no code tool and you just build out part of the front end without fully functional back end behind it). Something that looks and feels as a real product. In the past, we used clickable Figma prototypes that when you do them right, look and feel as a finished product because you can click through them.
You can add interactive menus, but again, there is no functionality behind the scenes. But when you have something that visual that customers can actually see and explore, it gives them a great idea of what you build in. And the best way to validate whether that’s something customers want or need is to ask for sale.
Because at the end of the day, people can tell you, this is an amazing product. Yes, you should build it. And it may be true. Maybe there is a need, but a lot of times people just want to be nice. Maybe they want to get you off the of their back if you are on a Zoom call with them. So they just want to say yes and move on.
The real test is when you ask for a credit card. If people are willing to give you money, that’s the biggest indicator that you are on the right track. In the early days, if you don’t have a functional product, what you can do, you can ask for pre-sale. You can offer in exchange for pre-sale because it will take you some time to build the product to get into the hands of customers.
What you can do: you can offer them exclusive access. Early access to the product. Maybe you can offer them a large discount. You can sell it as a lifetime license, so we will work with the startups that use AppSumo to publish their product, sell lifetime licenses, generate sales, and use that money to fund actual software development.
That’s the key way how startup founders can validate the ideas early on.
Frank: Thank you for that. I know there are varying examples of founders who will actually create ads for products that do not yet exist. It’s a great way to test and we’re hearing a lot about AI and low code, no code disrupting the space, allowing for faster MVP development and idea validation.
What are you hearing in this space, how is newer tech allowing faster development?
Lena: There are so many platforms these days. As I mentioned: Lovable, Rapid, Base44. I feel like there is something new popping every day. Those tools are great for quick prototyping, even even building functional products. I’ve seen many sites and platforms that are built using it.
So those tools are getting better. Every day you can build more and more robust products that can be scaled up to hundreds and thousands of users. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages going with a no code platform. If you’re thinking about enterprise level systems, if you have high security standards, we need to be compliant. If you have data that needs to be secure and protected, your best bet to go with the traditional development route and do the coding, writing code from scratch.
But if you build in something that’s maybe less demanding from the standards, no code is a great way to go, and it’s democratizing space for founders and companies to go in and start building their own products. Like back in the day, when we started getting those page builders like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, it gave a lot of business owners tools to independently go and build their websites.
It doesn’t mean that the websites that they create will be the best designed websites, or that they’re going to win awards, but they now have websites. They own the web with sites that get the job done. The same idea with no code tools versus going the custom software development route through a higher-end professional agency.
You may get started with no code. You may get something that’s good enough to get the job done, and when you’re ready to take it to the next level, that’s where you can upgrade and hire a professional agency to do more polish job or a higher agency. Also to help you with that quick prototyping with the no code tools and then continue. Continue expanding and continue building from there.
Frank: Thank you. Lots of good advice that will be in the transcript. Thanks to one of those no code tools that you mentioned that we’ll put our transcript into.
Lena: We use those, amazing for automation proposal writing. Just note-taking, everything.
Frank: Massive time saver. So from Australia to New York. You and I met during your time in Buffalo, New York. And I want to talk about some of your experiences here. You founded Girl Develop It Buffalo, grew it to 900 members, organized over 300 events, and now you're Entrepreneur in Residence at Launch NY. You’re also now involved as a co-founder of EVO Tech & Startup Community. Why is it important for you to create communities alongside venture and advisory work?
Lena: I think at the end of the day, it’s all about people. Everything that we do and the community, people will always want to connect and find like minded people. With the advance of social media the last couple of decades, I feel like the pendulum moved a little bit in the different directions where everybody jumped online.
There’s a lot of people who just wanted to be online, consume information online. But now we’re getting overload of technology, the trend that I’m seeing across different industries is people are returning back into the communities. I see there are a lot of community focused businesses.
I’ve seen then popping everywhere. Not just in the tech space, but coaching, mentoring, wellness and communities become their own sort of business. For example, I just saw a post on LinkedIn the other day where the company is in San Francisco.
Right now, the startups are hiring community managers that can build a community around particular brand. And the reason why this shift, this is happening is, again, at the end of the day, it’s all about the relationships between people and how they connect with each other. And having that support is important, especially if you’re an entrepreneur.
For me, when I started in the tech space and when I moved to the US, I got a lot of support from people in Buffalo. And I wanted to pass that kindness on to others. The founders, the companies that enter the space. I’ve been mentoring and working with startups for many years.
Right now, I’m a mentor at Launch New York. I’ve also been a mentor at Founder Institute in Buffalo. I’ve been a mentor at the Jebediah online accelerator program and a couple others. It’s a great way to give back. Meet interesting people, meet founders, and also help them, help them to reach their goals faster and avoid those common mistakes that founders tend to make.
Frank: Thank you. As a follow up, what did you learn about inclusive design from these experiences? And can you explain what inclusive design means for those not familiar with the term?
Lena: Yes. Inclusive design is a design approach that keeps in mind the needs of various types of users. A lot of times we as we design something, we only keep in mind our own goals and priorities and how we navigate applications. But there are a lot of different types of users that may have certain limitations and disabilities that not always have been taken into account when designers create websites, apps, even just something as simple as having a proper contrast, proper size of the fonts that may exclude people with poor vision.
Even basic things like as designers, we want to keep in mind to make sure that when we create applications, they are inclusive so people can access them not only from their phones, but they can also use screen readers, voice navigation and other tools that allow, um, allow people to access access content.
Frank: Thank you. Okay, so for those listening who may not know, last year I hired Forcoda and Lena to develop two website projects for me. First of all, Lena, I want to thank you for the exceptional design work that you and your team delivered for both the TechXY and the Only Human websites. The design process was agile, collaborative, and I felt we moved very quickly on a very small budget and went to market quickly.
So thank you for that. For anyone listening considering a website software project, can you walk through what that process can look like and how you shift or flex it based on the founder you’re working with and that person’s experience industry?
Lena: Thank you for mentioning, that was a fun project that we did together. We enjoyed working with you as well and helping you build the presence for for TechXY and Only Human. In terms of the process, how we normally approach it is we always start with the business and founder and needs in mind.
Because on our team we have a unique combination of skill sets: we’re not only developers and designers, but we also have the business and product expertise. Whenever we look at a project, we look at it from these three different angles. And we always want to understand what your business needs are, what your user needs are, and what problem you are solving.
That way when we design or build something, the product aligns with business growth strategy, with the customer needs, and the features that we’re building directly support that. Once we understand that direction, then we provide and we come up with a technology strategy, what would be the best technology approach for you to use.
Depending on the type of project, is it going to be small? Is it going to be large? It’s going to be scaling to 100,000 users in the next five years. So all those components and requirements can inform the technical decisions.
Whether we’re doing low code or are doing the custom mobile app. Is it the hybrid mobile app. So those things we can discuss and tailor to our client project needs. Then after that we work on the design again. We want to make sure that we have user needs in mind. If there are any unique aspects that we need to keep in mind, we incorporate as well.
We also implement user and market research to make sure that we are not missing anything. We can also leverage other companies experiences and best practices. Then marry them with our own expertise and also our customer domain expertise. Then once we have a design that’s polished, refined, we can also do a series of user testing sessions to make sure that before we go and build something, we showed it to the users, got their feedback, made tweaks in the design phase (because it’s more effective to change something while you have design versus when you have a completed application, and now you want to change something that can cost you ten times more, versus if you change something on the design screen).
Once the designs are polished up, that’s where we take it to development. We normally follow a two week sprint methodology. Every week we have a meeting with the customer, they see the progress, they stay in the loop, they provide the feedback.
That way there is nothing unexpected, and there are no unknowns. Customer always in control of their process and provide the direct feedback as we build something. Once the product is completed, we do thorough rounds of QA and testing to make sure that we catch bugs and anything that wasn’t refined. Once the product is live, we continue monitoring and support it to make sure the applications are running stable and there are no issues, and customers continue having great support.
Once the customer is ready, we scale to provide additional development for new features. We also provide recommendations for opportunities where they can grow and scale and continue supporting customers strategically.
Frank: This year, you launched a Venture arm of Forcoda called Forcoda Ventures with your business partner, Gozel Akeyeva. What problems did you see founders repeatedly struggling with that led you to create Forcoda Ventures?
Lena: A few different challenges that we help companies solve. When it comes to scaling: that’s one of our areas of focus helping companies, early stage companies to scale. We help them position for growth. From a technology perspective, from a go to market perspective. A lot of times what we see is companies think too small or they don’t see all the different opportunities that exist.
So they might not see the best path forward. How to scale. That’s where we come into into play, helping them to identify those opportunities, become the strategic growth partners. And on the technology side, helping companies to get organized on their tech and processes. Because what we’ve seen in the company is raise funding.
They start hiring a ton of developers, but CEO and CTO are maybe too busy focusing on sales and other priorities. So team just gets too disorganized, like a bunch of abandoned kids. What we do, we come on board, and we help to establish best development practices, best processes to maximize the use of budget and reduce the burn rate and time spent redoing features and bottlenecks.
We’re essentially helping to streamline the whole development processes. We were also maximizing or helping investors be confident that their money was well spent and not just being wasted on the extra development hours. Then for the companies that are working overseas that want to enter the American market, we act as the key player, key contact that helps them to open doors, establish presence, navigate the intricacies of US legal, hiring systems, even strategy to take in product to market sales strategies.
How you sell in the US would be very different how you sell in Australia, for example, the US is more aggressive approach. Australians, for example, tend to be more, just less pushy. Helping companies enter the US market and not just from Australia, we open to working with companies from other areas entering the US. Helping them navigate those intricacies is where we can help.
Frank: Great, excellent. One of the things that we’ve developed organically on the show, we like to ask AI a question about our guests. So, fed in some background and here’s what it came up with.
As AI and low code and no code platforms proliferate. What will separate products that succeed from those that fail n an era where the technology itself becomes easier and easier to build?
Lena: With the investments in AI, more and more companies have less of a defensible moat around IT. What that means is that these days you can go write the product requirements, put them in the AI and no code tool, and you can replicate your competitor’s software pretty much within a couple of days.
The main differentiator that stays unique is the people behind the screens, people that are building those products. That’s something that experienced the understanding of the market, how to scale the products, how to sell them, how to acquire customers. That’s something that you cannot replicate just yet.
Having that expertise or bringing in the right partners on board can help you to take your technical product and sell it, find the right partnerships, have the right strategy, how to get in front of the customers. That way you can be faster than your competitors as you are rolling out the product to the market.
Those key differentiators would be important. Fundraising. If you can secure funding that can also help you move faster with your product. So that would be key components that differentiate great products that succeed in the current fast moving market versus the products that are left behind.
Frank: Great. Thank you. Been great having you on the show on TechXY Turbo. Where can listeners connect with you and learn more about you and your services?
Lena: Well, I am on all social media so you can find me on Instagram. My handle is “@IamLenaLevine”. I’m on LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube.
If you search for “Lena Levine”, you can find me there. You can also reach out to us through our website https://forcoda.com/. Happy to answer any questions that listeners may have.
Frank: Great. Thanks so much. Lena, thank you for coming to us all the way from Australia.
Lena: Thank you Frank.
