About Lumen
Lumen is a digital platform designed to support startup founders' mental health while boosting incubator success rates. With nearly half of all founders considering quitting due to burnout and stress, incubators are struggling to provide the emotional and practical support their cohorts truly need.
Lumen bridges this gap by combining AI-powered mentorship, mental health resources, and startup-specific coaching, all tailored to the founder journey. By integrating quick access to therapists, personalized emotional tracking, and peer support, Lumen creates a scalable system that supports founders’ wellbeing while increasing startup survival and performance.
Problem
Startup founders operate in high-pressure environments with limited support systems. Traditional incubators lack infrastructure to address the psychological toll of entrepreneurship. This results in:
High levels of stress and burnout
Lack of access to specialized mental health support
Low engagement in available wellness resources
Increased founder dropout and lower incubator success rates
Founders need flexible, accessible solutions that align with their demanding schedules and leadership responsibilities.
Solution
Lumen offers a dedicated platform for mental health, mentorship, and founder resilience. Through a combination of:
AI-powered emotional check-ins and coaching
On-demand access to founder-focused therapists
Community matching with other entrepreneurs
Insight reports for incubators to track founder wellbeing (anonymized)
Lumen ensures both founder wellbeing and incubator performance improve over time. This empowers incubators to retain high-potential startups, reduce emotional risk, and provide differentiated value to their cohorts.
Process
User Research & Interviews
Industry & Competitor Benchmarking
Ideation & Feature Prioritization
Wireframing & Prototyping
Usability Testing & Feedback Loops
Role
Co-founder, UX Strategist & Product Designer
Project Details
Project Duration: 20 weeks
Platform
Mobile and Web
Tools
Figma
Miro
Notion
ChatGPT
Loom
Trello
1. Research
2. Ideation
3. Design
4. Reflection
1. Research
1.1 Secondary Research
For my secondary research, I analyzed mental health reports, founder wellness studies, and industry benchmarks to understand the psychological challenges faced by startup founders and the gaps in existing incubator support systems. Research highlighted a strong link between high founder stress levels, burnout, and startup failure rates.
According to a report by Sifted, nearly 49% of founders consider quitting their startup, and 76% experience burnout, often without access to structured mental health support tailored to the startup journey.
A study from Startup Health Index found that 70% of early-stage founders wish their incubators offered mental health services, and over 50% reported that emotional fatigue directly impacts productivity and team morale.
By integrating digital-first, AI-powered wellness solutions, platforms can bridge this gap—transitioning from traditional business coaching to a founder-centric model that supports both emotional resilience and business growth.
Additionally, platforms that provide micro-interventions, asynchronous coaching, and mood analytics report up to a 40% increase in user engagement and improved retention in founder programs. These insights validated the opportunity for Lumen—a hybrid solution that combines AI mentorship, mental health support, and scalable insights for incubators.
1.2 Primary Research
To understand the needs, pain points, and behaviors of startup founders navigating emotional stress, I conducted interviews, surveys, and direct outreach with both founders and incubator managers. The goal was to identify what types of support founders need most — and what incubators currently lack.
The survey revealed that:
40% of respondents were early-stage founders experiencing chronic stress, often with no access to mental health tools.
25% were serial founders, actively seeking personalized coaching to improve resilience and focus.
15% were incubator managers, highlighting a need for scalable founder support systems.
10% were startup team members, looking for tools to help their founders stay focused and energized.
10% were wellness professionals, interested in expanding their services into the founder and incubator ecosystem.
These insights validated the need for a platform like Lumen—one that balances mental health support, AI-powered coaching, and community-driven accountability.
1.3 Screener Surveys
To build a solution that genuinely meets founders where they are, we ran a screener survey with 87 participants — a mix of early-stage founders, incubator operators, and mental health professionals embedded in startup ecosystems. Our goal was to uncover the emotional realities founders face and pinpoint the gaps in support that incubators aren't yet filling.
We asked one core question:
“What makes staying emotionally resilient as a founder hardest for you?”
Here’s what emerged:
35 respondents (40%) described experiencing frequent emotional burnout, citing constant pressure, decision fatigue, and the weight of responsibility as primary causes.
23 respondents (26%) said they had no access to startup-savvy mental health support, often defaulting to generic wellness apps that lacked relevance.
14 respondents (16%) wanted tools to track their emotional wellbeing over time, but didn’t know where to start.
9 respondents (10%) feared appearing “unfit to lead” if they opened up about stress — a stigma issue rooted deeply in startup culture.
6 respondents (7%) highlighted that existing support models felt time-consuming or hard to integrate into their daily routines.
These insights didn’t just validate the problem — they shaped Lumen’s core functionality:
quick check-ins, personalized emotional insights, and support that respects the chaos of founder life without adding more to their plate.
1.4 Interviews
To move beyond assumptions and surface-level data, I conducted six in-depth interviews with startup founders and incubator managers across Europe and Latin America. The goal was to dig into how founders experience stress, what support they actually use (if any), and why mental health is often deprioritized during early-stage startup life.
Major Takeaways
While founders had vastly different ventures and personalities, they consistently echoed the same core pain points:
Invisible pressure – Founders described a constant sense of needing to “keep it together,” often masking stress out of fear it would reflect poorly on their leadership.
Lack of relevance in existing tools – Traditional wellness platforms were seen as impersonal or generic, with no real connection to the pressures of raising, scaling, or leading teams.
Guilt around taking breaks – Time spent on self-care often triggered guilt, with one founder noting, “If I pause to breathe, my startup might fall behind.”
Fear of investor perception – Several mentioned being hesitant to seek therapy or coaching due to concerns about optics when raising capital.
Desire for embedded support – There was a strong appetite for mental health tools that work alongside their calendars, KPIs, and workflows — not in opposition to them.
Need for asynchronous options – Real-time therapy was seen as too rigid. Founders wanted check-ins or coaching on their own terms — before pitch day or after midnight if needed.
These conversations deeply influenced Lumen’s product direction, helping us prioritize:
Micro check-ins over longform sessions
Calendar-integrated support
Anonymized reporting for incubators
Founder-specific coaching frameworks
This phase reminded us that mental health design isn't about softening the founder journey — it's about reinforcing it with the right tools at the right time.
1.5 Affinity Mapping
Following the interviews, I transcribed key observations and pain points, then clustered them into recurring themes using an affinity mapping process. This helped distill a wide range of founder experiences into a focused set of actionable insights that would guide both product features and emotional tone.
By grouping sticky-note insights across categories like burnout triggers, workflow friction, and emotional blind spots, five core themes emerged:
1. Founder Isolation
2. Misfit Tools
3. Time Scarcity
4. Stigma in Startup Culture
5. Desire for Data-Driven Self-Awareness
1.6 Empathy Mapping
After synthesizing interviews and behavioral insights, I created a core empathy map to reflect Lumen’s primary user: the emotionally overloaded founder. This map served as a lens through which we designed every feature — from tone of voice to notification timing — ensuring we built not just for founders, but with an understanding of their lived experience.
1.7 Personas
After completing our interviews, empathy mapping, and affinity synthesis, we crafted detailed personas to represent our core user segments. These personas guided our design decisions, feature prioritization, and user testing processes by ensuring we always had real user needs front and center.
Each persona was built around recurring patterns in stress triggers, behavioral barriers, and emotional motivators — helping us ground Lumen’s features in empathy and real-world relevance.
1.8 How Might We
To synthesize our research into actionable opportunities, we created a set of How Might We (HMW) statements. These statements helped reframe user challenges not as blockers, but as entry points for innovation. Each one was crafted to reflect a real founder struggle uncovered in our interviews, surveys, and persona development.
They served as a creative springboard for ideation, ensuring every solution Lumen offered aligned with the lived experiences of startup founders and the structural gaps in incubator programs.
How might we...
Help founders regulate stress without disrupting their workday?
Offer mental health support that’s fast, relevant, and non-intrusive?
Build trust by showing founders they’re not alone in their emotional experience?
Reduce guilt around self-care by positioning it as a strategic advantage?
Allow incubators to support founders without adding operational overhead?
Make vulnerability feel safe, even in high-performance environments?
Track founder wellbeing without making them feel surveilled or micromanaged?
Encourage founders to check in with themselves as often as they check their KPIs?
These questions didn’t just shape our feature set — they became the philosophical backbone of Lumen’s user experience, reminding us that great design isn’t just useful, it’s compassionate.
2. Ideation
After defining the core challenges through user research and How Might We statements, I transitioned into ideation. This phase involved sketching early screen concepts, brainstorming solution paths, and aligning product decisions with the emotional and operational realities of startup founders.
The goal was to generate practical ideas that could be realistically integrated into founders' workflows without adding friction or complexity. I focused on minimizing effort while maximizing emotional value.
2.1 User Stories
To prioritize features, I developed a set of user stories, representing common needs and contexts uncovered during interviews. These stories were categorized by importance to help structure the MVP and future iterations.
High - Must Have
As a founder, I want to check in on my emotional state in under 30 seconds, so I can stay aware without losing focus on my day.
As a founder, I want mental health tips that align with pitch week or investor stress, so the advice feels relevant and usable.
As an incubator manager, I want anonymized wellbeing insights from my cohort, so I can intervene early without breaching privacy.
Medium - Nice To Have
As a founder, I want asynchronous micro-coaching, so I can get support when I have time, not just during office hours.
As a founder, I want a way to track my emotional patterns over time, so I can make proactive changes before burnout.
As an incubator manager, I want to send personalized nudges to founders without sounding like I’m micromanaging them.
Low - OK Not To Have
As a founder, I want to connect with other founders experiencing the same stress, so I feel less alone in the journey.
As a founder, I want short video content on managing burnout, so I can access help in a way that’s quick and digestible.
As a founder, I want to integrate Lumen with my calendar, so check-ins don’t interrupt my flow.
2.2 Sitemap
Once I had a clear understanding of our users’ emotional workflows, I designed Lumen’s sitemap to prioritize accessibility, emotional ease, and contextual relevance. The goal was to give founders quick access to high-impact tools without overwhelming them or disrupting their day.
Lumen’s structure was built around adaptive, modular navigation — not just a dashboard, but a flow that mirrors how founders feel at different stages: calm, stressed, focused, or fatigued. Every section was built with low cognitive load and emotional sensitivity in mind.
2.3 User Flow
Understanding how users navigate through ADIS was essential in optimizing the system for efficient monitoring and predictive maintenance. By mapping out key user interactions, we ensured that critical alerts, system diagnostics, and maintenance scheduling were intuitive and accessible.
2.4 Sketches
Sketching played a crucial role in shaping the user flows for ADIS, helping me visualize the navigation and interactions needed for real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance. I quickly realized that the interface needed to be clean, intuitive, and data-driven, with a focus on critical alerts and system efficiency.
2.5 Low Fidelity Wireframes
Using my sketches as a guide, I began working in Figma and brought those sketches into low-fidelity wireframes; doing so helped clarify how I wanted functions spaced out on screen and gave me a much better insight into how I could simplify and prioritize functions.
3. Design
Now that the software has a structured user flow, the focus shifted to refining its design. The goal was to keep the interface clean and minimal, ensuring that data visualization and alerts remained the primary focus. Given that ADIS is a real-time industrial monitoring system, I opted for a structured layout with a professional, intuitive feel, avoiding unnecessary visual clutter.
The interface prioritizes clarity, with a balanced use of color to differentiate between normal, warning, and critical alerts. The design ensures that technicians and operators can quickly interpret system health and take necessary actions without distractions.
3.1 Moodboard
I started by creating a moodboard to define the aesthetic direction. The goal was to establish a functional, data-driven, and highly legible interface while maintaining a sense of control and efficiency for users.
I chose a color scheme that reinforces urgency and clarity—greens for stable operations, yellows for warnings, and reds for critical alerts. The typography and iconography are selected to ensure high readability and quick scanning, crucial for industrial environments where time-sensitive decisions are made. The design of ADIS is built to instill confidence, ensure efficiency, and support real-time decision-making with a structured yet visually intuitive approach.
3.3 Style Guide
I developed a style guide to create a cohesive and intuitive user experience. The chosen colors reflect industrial precision and reliability, ensuring that data remains highly readable in complex dashboards.
The interface prioritizes clarity and efficiency, using strong contrasts and structured typography for quick information retrieval. Minimal shadows and color-coded alerts enhance usability, making critical alerts immediately recognizable.
3.4 High Fidelity Wireframes
With the use of my style guide, I began to build my high-fidelity screens. I focused on making the content easily accessible and easy to understand. By giving descriptive information, categories and intuitive flow.
4. Reflection
4.1 Conclusion
Designing ADIS was a valuable learning experience, allowing me to explore real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance from a UX/UI perspective. Throughout this project, I refined my skills in designing data-driven interfaces, balancing functionality with clarity to ensure that complex industrial insights were accessible and actionable.
One of the biggest challenges was the testing phase. Due to the constraints of this project being part of an academic course, we were unable to conduct formal usability testing with real users in an industrial environment. While testing is a crucial phase of UX design, factors such as limited access to actual industrial settings and time constraints prevented us from gathering direct user feedback.
Despite this, we made design decisions based on UX best practices, industry research, and heuristic evaluations to ensure usability. The interface was structured to align with standard monitoring dashboards, ensuring familiarity for industrial professionals. If given the opportunity in a real-world scenario, usability testing would focus on validating navigation efficiency, alert readability, and user interactions with predictive analytics.
This project reinforced the importance of designing for clarity and actionability in high-stakes environments. It also highlighted the need for iterative design, where testing and feedback loops play a critical role in refining interfaces. Moving forward, I aim to incorporate real-world usability studies to validate and enhance future iterations of ADIS, ensuring it meets the needs of industrial professionals effectively.