From Cute to Brutalist: How I Rebuilt a Product I Was Ashamed Of

When I first started my company, SwayID (fka Swaypay) in November 2021, I insisted on making everything look cute.

It hurts to type this:

I spent several hundred thousand dollars making beautiful, adorable product and marketing materials…

All form.
Zero function.
For two years.
From January 2022 through the end of 2023.

Case in point:

Then, in the last week of 2023, I began to straighten the fuck up.

Because by then, my own autopsy report said one thing loud and clear:

And frankly, never show my face as an entrepreneur again.

I was that disgusted with my execution heading into 2024.

That became the new bar.

So we stripped the pleasantries, including the welcome mat.

We designed onboarding like a hospital room:

Cold. Necessary.

Not somewhere you stay unless you absolutely need to.

Intentionally brutalist:

• Grayscale

• No illustrations

• No personality

• Just cold forms and legalese to click through.

It looked like Stripe.

It felt like a hospital room.

You didn’t want to stay.

And that was the point.

Because if you needed this product anyway—despite the friction, the cold, the total absence of charm then I knew I could be proud of myself again.

I needed to feel proud of myself again.

The Core Principle: Intentional Friction as Gatekeeper

A killer way to surface value is to kill comfort.

This Isn’t New.

You’ve seen this kind of friction-before-comfort dynamic before:

• Hospital rooms are designed to make you leave.

• Airport gates don’t coddle you. They move you.

• Hazing is emotional filtering: suffer → bond → belong.

Once we had enough signal (literally this week), we earned the right to care.

So we asked:

From “Get Through It” → to “Grow Through It”

This week, we finally earned the right to redesign onboarding to reflect what we actually believe:

• That professionalism doesn’t need to feel like punishment

• That behavioral infrastructure should make you feel safer, not just smarter

So we turned up the warmth and laid out a welcome mat.

Snapshot of new onboarding flow (shipping this coming ~Monday):

Snapshot of current onboarding flow for reference:

We swapped grey boxes for warm color, trust language, and clean progress.
We introduced badges, emotional payoff, and one-liners like:

Because SwayID isn’t just about demand letter or lawsuit risk mitigation.

It’s about emotional de-escalation.

I know the difference firsthand.

Being handled by cold legalese and lawyers in crisis mode is excruciating.

Being met with warmth, calm, and clarity…even just one human moment…would’ve meant the world to me in a few moments that have since hardened into painful memories I’ll carry for the rest of my life.

That’s why it matters.
And it’s personal.

Now that we know our value proposition is absolute, we will begin to intentionally meet our customers with emotionally intelligent de-escalation—from first click to final receipt.

New onboarding flow launches next week.

Along with major upgrades to our Content Risk Checker and Corrector Tool.

We didn’t just redesign onboarding screens.
We rewired the nervous system.

Every frame below was engineered to calm cortisol and increase clarity because emotional safety is just as mission-critical to compliance infrastructure as code is.

This is the new SwayID:

• Legally serious

• Emotionally safe

• Visually calming

• Psychologically grounding

• Nervous-system inclusive

Bonus: The Psychological Constructs Nobody Talks About

I now belong.

-Kaeya