Building inside the workflow, not adjacent to it

Most software for regulated professional services gets built adjacent to the work. A founder reads about the industry, interviews a few practitioners, builds a prototype, finds out three months later which assumptions were wrong, iterates. It works — slowly.

We’re trying to skip the slow part.

I spent the past year as Fractional CEO at Visa Alliance — running process improvement inside an active Australian immigration agency. Not as a consultant flying in to deliver a deck and leave; as the person whose job it was to make the operations work better, day after day. That engagement is where the Pulse thesis came from.

What that buys you is hard to describe to investors who haven’t done it. The short version: when a workflow breaks, you don’t hear about the break in a stakeholder interview a week later. You feel it that morning. You watch a case manager spend twenty minutes finding a document that should have surfaced in twenty seconds. You watch a client follow-up get missed because it lived in the wrong inbox. You see exactly the friction, in the actual sequence it occurs, with no translation layer.

The product thesis becomes very concrete very fast.

Naina is in the work

The other half of this is that my co-founder Naina is still inside an agency — head of the Employer Sponsored Program Unit at the same firm. She runs TSS 482, ENS 186, DAMA, Labour Agreements, ART appeals. Every week, she sees pain in the workflow the same day the rest of the team does. Every week, that pain becomes a ticket — or a conversation that becomes a ticket.

This is the unfair advantage in vertical SaaS that’s hardest to manufacture: a founder who is in the work, not adjacent to it. We didn’t have to hire for it. We started with it.

What “design partner” actually means here

Three Australian agencies are shaping Pulse with us. One of them — Visa Alliance, where Naina runs the work-visa department — has also written our only outside cheque. Visa Alliance brings a forward-thinking technology vision and the appetite to push the envelope further in a category that hasn’t seen meaningful product investment in a decade. That conviction is what led them to write the first risky cheque — for the product they’re shaping, and for the industry it stands to lift behind them. Investor and customer are the same entity.

For us, that’s the cleanest possible signal: product-pull preceded capital. The agency wasn’t writing a cheque on a deck; the cheque came after a year of seeing the build, using prototypes, and deciding the architecture was right. The other two partners signed on after seeing what was shipping.

This is the opposite of the typical pre-seed shape, where the cheque comes first and the customer-discovery starts after. Here the discovery preceded the cheque and the build preceded both.

It also keeps us honest in a way that matters. Anything we ship that doesn’t make the partner’s Tuesday afternoon easier doesn’t make it past the first review. There’s no abstract roadmap; there’s the work, and the work is what we’re tightening.

We’ll write a lot more about this as the program runs. Notes is where it’ll live.