Caplane

Caplane connects business sellers with qualified buyers. I designed their Seller Preparation Flow, the system that takes a business owner from first signup to a market-ready deal room.

Problem

Most sellers entering Caplane weren't transaction-ready. Documentation was incomplete, disorganized, or missing entirely. Three issues compounded:

Sellers didn't know what they needed. M&A preparation involves dozens of financial, legal, and operational documents. Most small business owners had never been through the process.

Deal quality suffered. Incomplete deal rooms eroded buyer confidence before conversations even started.

Due diligence dragged. Missing documents created repeated back-and-forth that slowed or killed deals.

What I designed

Readiness Assessment — A short questionnaire that scores seller preparedness and routes them into one of two paths, fast-track listing or guided preparation. No one-size-fits-all onboarding.

Preparation Hub — A central dashboard organizing preparation into four areas: Financials, Legal & Corporate, Operations, and Deal Room Setup. Each area shows completion status, required versus recommended items, and direct actions. Progress is visible at every level.

Service Provider Marketplace — An embedded marketplace for vetted M&A attorneys, transaction accountants, appraisers, tax advisors, and insurance brokers. Sellers discover providers filtered by geography, specialization, and deal size, then request introductions with pre-filled context. Completed deliverables feed directly back into the Document Vault.

Pre-Launch Deal Room — A full preview of how the deal appears to buyers, with confidentiality tiers (Blind Profile, NDA Signed, LOI Stage), an AI-assisted executive summary, financial performance tables, and a completeness score that nudges sellers to close remaining gaps before launch.

Results

Faster time to market — structured guidance reduced preparation time from signup to launch-ready deal room.

Higher deal quality — more complete deal rooms at listing improved buyer confidence from first impression.

Less due diligence friction — complete documentation upfront reduced repeated information requests during negotiations.

Increased advisor engagement — contextual marketplace recommendations drove higher provider connection rates.

What I had to work with

A third-party component library — No existing design system, no time to build one from scratch. I adopted a third-party library and customized it extensively, tokens, patterns, visual language, until it felt entirely native to Caplane's brand.

A 4-week deadline — Leadership needed to move fast. Rather than starting from a blank canvas, I focused on high-impact decisions and used what already existed to move smarter.

The approach paid off at handoff — Because the library had an existing codebase, engineering could build directly from the designs without creating components from scratch, cutting the time from handoff to go-to-market significantly.

Key decisions

Route by readiness, not assumption — A dynamic assessment prevents unnecessary friction for prepared sellers while guiding those who need help.

Show context, not just upload fields — Explaining why each document matters to buyers improved completion rates significantly over bare file-upload interfaces.

Allow launch before 100% — Sellers can go to market with minimum viable documentation. The system shows what strengthens their position without hard-blocking progress.