Silo // 2024
Capital Onboarding
Enabling new customers to self-sign up for Silo and apply for capital funding in order to grow their business.
Overview
Silo’s Capital products offer unique value, but the processes surrounding them were not sustainable for scale, especially with acquisition. This project focused on simplifying and streamlining the way in which someone joins and onboards to Silo Capital. Beyond that, it provided a modular framework to reuse for other onboarding experiences across Silo.
Role: Lead Designer
I worked with product management, engineering, and internal operations to ideate, validate, and execute end-to-end designs.
Timeline: 5 months
September 2023–February 2024
Silo is a platform of solutions for businesses in the perishable food supply chain industry.
It helps growers, distributors, and retailers connect and automate their operations. Folks behind these companies are typically old-school, relying on business relationships and antiquated software to get their work done.
Silo Capital offers unique financing solutions that align with the dynamics of the food supply chain, setting it apart from traditional lending institutions. In doing this, Silo creates opportunities for businesses to access capital more easily and quickly than ever before.
For example: a produce distributor may need some extra cash to help purchase a larger warehouse facility, so they can land larger customers and expand their business. A grower may need cash more quickly than they typically receive it from their buyers to get them through their slow season.
The problem
Onboarding is inefficient, time consuming, and heavily reliant on manual effort from everyone to get a new customer onboarded to Silo Capital. It creates a barrier for users to sign up and hinders Silo’s ability to collect information and assess prospective capital users with confidence.
For customers
The process is unclear, unfamiliar, and complicated—they have to juggle multiple softwares and conversations to even apply for funding.
For Silo employees
Internal process are inefficient and messy—from email outreach to sifting through applications, copious amounts of time are wasted on tedious work.
We have an opportunity to create a streamlined onboarding experience that simplifies the information collection process for both users and the Silo Operations team.
This will lower the barrier to entry for users, offload tasks for internal operations, and lead to more accurate application data—ultimately improving Silo’s ability to assess risk and approve users in a shorter amount of time.
Silo’s vision as a company is to become a modular platform of products. As a secondary goal, we want to align with this vision and define what onboarding looks like across all Silo products; one that is cohesive, flexible, and effective.
The process
discovery
Where are we now?
There was a lot to understand with regards to Silo Capital and the processes behind it. I met with internal teams (Account Executives, Sales, Capital Operations) to walk through the current processes and pain points.
Insights
The majority of workflows are handled manually outside of the platform.
More time is spent tracking down data and reviewing accuracy than reviewing actual applications.
The current process makes it easier to miss crucial information about an applicant (ie. bank loans).
No two capital applicants are the same; each business has a unique background and requires specific information.
Users are generally hesitant with change; they’re comfortable with their current processes.
strategy + planning
Where do we want to go?
With the problem space defined and a clear path forward, it was time to start thinking about the solution. I formed my design approach around themes that tied back to the problem and pain points. From there, it was all about thinking big picture—making sure all scenarios were accounted for and the framework would scale.
Centralize.
Reign in the fragmented setup steps and streamline it to be cohesive and smooth.
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Utilize tried and true onboarding practices, harness familiarity and simplicity.
Think modular.
Lay a foundation for how onboarding should look across all Silo product experiences.
Map out the journey to capture the entirety of the experience.
A bird’s eye view of the end-to-end experience allowed me to validate the workflow with my team and understand the scope of design in a bit more detail.
Define the reusable setup flows.
I explicitly called out these “setup modules” so my engineering team could implement them to be self-contained and therefore utilized elsewhere in Silo. For example, linking a bank account would look the same here as it does when setting up payments in the core platform.
Fill in the details and sequence out the steps.
More time was spent further refining the information within each step and the order in which a user would see them—specifically looking at easing the user into the experience and leveraging earlier steps to pre-fill information further in the process.
design
Preliminary concepts
Comparative analysis and exploratory low-fidelity designs allowed me to form a working concept that I could validate internally and externally. The layout needed to house varying amounts of information and tasks, while also providing a sense of continuity.
Customer POV: Given the nature of this onboarding, it was important to provide guidance but also allow flexibility (step skipping, leaving and returning to the workflow, and avenues for support and references).
Detailed designs
As I rounded out the designs, I focused on the remaining details involved in the setup experience. This included:
Third party integrations: managing out-of-platform setups.
Document uploading: making it customized and approachable.
Application review: providing adequate summary details prior to submitting the application.
Post-submission: clear expectations of what to expect after a user sends their application to Silo.
Messaging: ensuring thoughtful product copy and translation-friendly UI (a lot of our users are Spanish-speaking).
The results
Final solution
The final onboarding experience guided prospective capital customers through setting up a Silo account and completing their preliminary underwriting application. This included providing proof of business legitimacy, verifying bank accounts, and providing sales history and other important documents for verification purposes.
Impact
A beta release was rolled out in February 2023, followed by a general release for all net new customers. In a timespan of 3 months, we saw an increase in Capital customers, and Silo ops team members noted a much smoother experience and less upfront work getting customers into the onboarding pipeline.
The setup framework also held up and was implemented in future projects, such as updating general Silo account creation and new order management product onboarding.
32
new users onboarded
(compared to 1-2 new users/month previously)
60%
conversion rate
with the new onboarding experience
2+ hours
shaved off of internal operations
for the Underwriting Team reviewing applications
Takeaways
A balancing act. This project challenged me in balancing the desired quickness of onboarding with the extensiveness of a Capital funding application. With the two being in direct conflict, I had to lean into setting expectations and encouraging progress wherever I could. I also enjoyed approaching this project with scale in mind—creating a UI framework that could easily be adapted to other onboarding experience across Silo. With this project, I was able to put my systems thinking to work, simultaneously accounting for the little details in each setup step while keeping an eye on the broader end-to-end experience.