Omelo
Designing the first version of Omelo and figuring out how people actually wanted to use it.
Founding Product Designer • 7 Months • Pre-seed • Full-time
At a glance
Role
Founding Product Designer
Industry
Pet Healthcare
Product
App & Healthcare Ecosystem
Users
Pet Parents, Stray Carers, Pet Rescue Specialists
Focus
Product Design, Product Strategy, User Research, Growth Design
The story
When I joined Omelo, there wasn't much of a product.
There was an idea.
A small team.
And a lot of assumptions.
As the first designer, my job wasn't just designing screens. It was helping figure out what the product should become.
That meant spending just as much time talking to users as I did inside Figma.
The problem
Preventive healthcare is hard.
Not because people don't care about their pets.
Because they usually don't think about healthcare until something goes wrong.
So we weren't trying to solve a UI problem.
We were trying to answer a much bigger question.
How do you make preventive care feel useful before people actually need it?
What I owned
I designed the first version of the product from the ground up.
That included:
Product flows
Mobile UI
Prototypes
Design system
Investor pitch decks
Marketing assets
Alongside that, I worked directly with the founders on product strategy and partnered closely with engineering, research and marketing throughout the project.
Then we noticed something.
As the product started getting into people's hands, we began speaking to users regularly while also looking at behavioural data.
One thing kept coming up.
People liked the idea.
People understood the product.
But many never reached the moment where Omelo actually became useful.
That completely changed the conversation.
Instead of asking
"How do we improve onboarding?"
we started asking
"How do we help people experience value sooner?"
Changing the first experience
The app was never the problem.
In fact, that's where the real value lived.
Health tracking.
Vaccination records.
Long-term history.
Personalised insights.
The problem was asking people to invest time before getting anything back.
So we explored a different first step.
Instead of making the app the very first interaction, we started thinking about how a familiar conversational experience could answer someone's first question, build trust and naturally lead them into the product.
The app stayed exactly where it belonged.
It just didn't have to be the first thing people saw.
One small change.
A completely different way of thinking about activation.
Beyond product design
Like most early-stage startups, there wasn't a clear line between design and everything else.
Depending on what the team needed, I found myself:
Reviewing implementation with engineering
Working with research to understand user behaviour
Helping the AI team think through conversations
Creating investor decks
Designing marketing campaigns
Mentoring a design intern
The best part about working this early was getting to influence the product long before pixels were involved.
By the time I left
Founding Designer
Owned product design from day one
Cross-Platform Design
Designed for mobile, web and marketing
0→1 Product
Designed the MVP from concept to launch
Design System
Built the foundation for consistent scaling
AI-Powered Experience
Integrated AI across key user journeys
Healthcare Innovation
Making preventive pet care more accessible
Looking back
Before Omelo, I thought good product design meant building polished interfaces.
Six months later, I realised that's probably the smallest part of the job.
The real work was understanding where people got stuck, questioning assumptions and helping the team make better product decisions.
That's the biggest thing I took away from being a founding designe
Continue Reading…
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