Bid Rocket
Rebuilding a core product in six weeks
Rebuilt a fundraising event-management platform and its marketing site from the ground up, moving it from an on-site-assisted tool to a fully remote, self-serve SaaS product with a better-converting site to match.
BidRocket helps nonprofits run large fundraising events. The original product required on-site staff to support users through the process, a model that couldn't scale. The team needed a complete rebuild as a standalone SaaS product, with a two-person team and a six-week deadline.
Finding the Gaps
The original product relied on people to fill the gaps software hadn't been built to handle yet. Auditing the existing build meant going through every flow to see which of those responsibilities could move into the product itself, and which problems were holding the whole system back. That gave me a clear direction for the rebuild before any high-fidelity work began.
Building the Foundation
Before touching high-fidelity screens, I built out a design system covering components, forms, and visual patterns. That gave the dev team a head start on implementation while I moved on to other priorities within our fast-moving timeline.
Expanding the Navigation
The original horizontal navigation had limited space, which forced links to nest under a handful of broad categories. That made the information architecture hard to navigate, especially in the middle of a live event, when organizers needed to find things fast.
My instinct was that the structure could be better, but rather than redesign based on assumption, I ran a card-sorting exercise with real users to find out how they actually thought about these categories. That research pointed to a clearer structure, one that fit better as a side navigation than the original horizontal layout ever could.
A Smarter Dashboard
The original dashboard was a wall of static links with no real information. I rebuilt it as a dynamic view with real funding data, key tasks, and and event snapshot so users can quickly understand where their event stands at a glance, instead of digging for it.
Closing the Loop
The biggest gap in the original product was everything that used to happen in person. I designed an Event Planning Checklist and an Event-Day Launchpad to close that gap, giving BidRocket a feature set competitors simply didn't have.
Results → 4.6 Stars
One year after launch, BidRocket held a 4.6/5 rating on Capterra, with customers reporting measurable results: one nonprofit said the new check-in and check-out flow helped them raise double what they had in past events.
