Case Study

Systems Over Heroics: One Person, Three Functions, One Goal.

How I Built the Infrastructure That Let a 6-Person Startup Scale Without Chaos

Diprekshya Maharjan
Product Operations & Growth Marketing
CoBlack · November 2025 – June 2026

Executive Summary02 / 12

Executive Summary

Company
CoBlack (AI Startup)
Stage
Pre-launch to scaling
Role
Marketing Strategy & Content Growth Apprentice (Operations, Marketing & Strategy)
Timeline
6 months (Nov 2025 – June 2026)

As an early team member at a 6-person startup, I collaborated on initiatives spanning support workflows, customer feedback systems, beta testing, email campaigns, brand guidelines, and launch coordination. This cross-functional experience taught me how product, marketing, operations, and customer success must work together to create sustainable growth.

Rather than contributing to a single function, I worked across product operations, growth marketing, and brand strategy to help CoBlack prepare for scale.

The Challenge03 / 12

The Challenge

CoBlack was preparing to launch an AI product in a competitive market. The core problem: how do you build operational infrastructure before you need it?

Without pre-launch systems, a startup faces chaos during scale. Customers arrive faster than support can respond. Feedback gets lost. Product priorities conflict with customer needs. Marketing campaigns lack proper onboarding flows. Teams work in silos instead of together.

No support infrastructure
What happens when customers have issues but no one's accountable?
Scattered customer insights
Feedback came through email, Slack, messages — no centralized system feeding into product decisions.
Beta chaos
How do you test with users before launch without a clear process?
Siloed teams
Product, marketing, operations, and customer success weren't aligned on workflows or priorities.
My Contribution04 / 12

My Contribution

I contributed across three major areas:

Product Operations
  • Support model design
  • Escalation workflows
  • Ticket prioritization
  • Feedback systems
  • SLA definitions
Growth Marketing
  • Email campaign strategy
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Launch marketing
  • Onboarding flows
  • Community outreach
Brand Strategy
  • Brand guidelines
  • Messaging framework
  • Voice & tone
  • Visual identity
  • Content pillars
Product Operations05 / 12

Product Operations

Building Systems Before Scale

The most important infrastructure isn't glamorous — it's invisible until it breaks. I designed systems that let CoBlack handle customer interactions at scale.

Support Model & Structure
Defined how support would be organized: ownership, response times, escalation paths, and customer tiers. Without this, every issue becomes a firefight.
Escalation Matrix
Created clear rules: which issues go to engineering? Which to product? Which to founders? When does a support ticket become a product insight? This prevents bottlenecks and ensures problems reach the right people.
Ticket Prioritization Framework
Designed a system to separate urgent issues from nice-to-haves. By severity and impact, teams knew what to fix first without constant meetings.
Customer Feedback Loop
Built the system that turns support conversations into product insights. Customer → Support → Intake → Product → Engineering → Improvement. Every stage mattered.
From the Admin Panel Blueprint & Beta Support Model — authored Nov 2025 to Apr 2026
"One tier. Everyone equal."
During beta, every person using the product was treated as a partner giving signal — not a customer to be managed. No tiered queues, no premium lanes, until volume said otherwise.
Support team structure
  • Support Lead — owns SLAs, triage, reporting.
  • Support Agent — handles Tier 1 tickets.
  • Technical / IT Support — handles escalations.
  • Dev Liaison — routes bugs to engineering.
  • Product Feedback Manager — turns feedback into insights.
  • Negative Review Monitor — monitors, responds, escalates.
Weekly rotation
MHMSDJ
Six people rotated ownership of the inbox so no single person carried it indefinitely. Escalation ran by function, not by name: bugs to Dev with founders informed, payment issues to a founder, and feedback reviewed by the founding team each Post-Launch Call.
Open
Assigned
In Progress
Resolved
Closed
Severity
Definition
Response target
Critical
Platform down or blocking core operations entirely
Within 4 hrs
Standard
Bugs, feature requests, billing questions, feedback
Within 24–48 hrs
Escalation trigger. A critical ticket unresolved after 24 hours escalates straight to leadership; a ticket reopened more than twice escalates automatically, so the same issue never loops silently.
Beta targets. 30%+ of users self-serve through FAQs before filing a ticket, and average CSAT stays at 4.0+ throughout the beta window.
Scale trigger. The shared inbox and manual tracker held until tickets passed roughly 40/week — at that point the same category taxonomy migrates straight into a real ticketing tool.
Reference artifacts
Beta rollout plan showing Phase 1 alpha prep and setup, and Phase 2 beta live activities including tester onboarding, feedback collection, and rewards
Beta rollout plan — Phase 1: Alpha Prep & Setup defined scope, tester groups, and testing assets; Phase 2: Beta Live covered onboarding, feedback cadence, and tester rewards.
Customer support workflow diagram: user experiences a problem, submits a support ticket in-app, receives a trigger email and FAQs, gets an auto-created and categorized ticket, is auto-assigned to a queue by tier and priority, support responds, resolves root cause with knowledge capture, sends an email, closes with CSAT feedback, and insights are added to the weekly report
The full ticket path end to end — from the moment a user hits a problem to the CSAT score and weekly-report insight it eventually becomes.
Growth Marketing06 / 12

Growth Marketing

From Acquisition to Retention

Marketing doesn't end at signup. Every customer interaction after acquisition influences retention, advocacy, and product decisions. I designed systems to connect these dots.

Email Campaign Strategy
Mapped out pre-launch, launch, and post-launch email sequences. Each was designed with specific goals: build anticipation, drive adoption, reduce churn, gather feedback.
Customer Journey Map
Documented the full journey from awareness to advocate. Identified pain points, moments of delight, and where marketing, product, and support intersected.
Onboarding Workflows
Designed the experience new customers would have on day one. Clear, guided, successful. Poor onboarding kills retention before product quality matters.
Launch Marketing Coordination
Orchestrated the launch across all channels while ensuring product operations, support, and marketing were aligned. Timing, messaging, customer expectations — everything had to sync.
Selected planning artifacts
Email and community brainstorm document outlining a waitlist email flow (welcome, teaser, behind the scenes, beta reminder, insider updates, promotions) and CoBlack's differentiation versus other AI job search apps
Waitlist email flow planning — sequencing the post-signup drip and defining why CoBlack v. other AI apps for messaging consistency.
CoBlack job success referral flow diagram showing the path from a user getting a job through requesting a referral code, leaving a testimonial, and generating a referral link
Job Success Referral Flow — turning a customer's win into a retention and acquisition loop, from testimonial prompt to referral link generation.
Brand Strategy07 / 12

Brand Strategy

Defining How We Communicate

Brand isn't just a logo. It's how every team member talks about the product, handles customers, and thinks about the mission. I built the frameworks that made our brand consistent across touchpoints.

Brand Guidelines
Created documented standards for visual identity, typography, photography style, and usage — consistent whether support was sending an email or marketing was posting on social.
Email & Marketing Templates
Designed reusable templates that enforced brand consistency. Welcome email, support response, product announcement — all felt like the same company.
Messaging Framework
Defined our core story, value proposition, and key messages — guiding how PMs talked to customers, how support explained features, how marketing positioned us.
Content & voice artifacts
Campaign pillars diagram showing four content pillars — Pain Points, Behind the Scenes, Success Stories, and Educational/Informative — mapped to the brand feeling of awareness, credibility, transparency, reliability, and peace
Campaign pillars — four recurring content pillars built to earn awareness, credibility, transparency, reliability, and peace with job seekers.
Behind the Scene campaign pillar breakdown covering BTS-Human (educational leadership, face on social), Community and Interaction (engagement wins, polls, milestones), and BTS-Product (behind-the-build transparency)
Voice & tone in practice — defining the human, community, and product angles that made CoBlack sound like a person, not a faceless platform.
Content pillars brainstorming document listing creator clip ideas, street-style interview questions, and a community challenge concept called 'One Line That Should Be On My Resume'
Content pillar brainstorm — scripted prompts for creator clips, street-style interviews, and a community challenge, all built around one message: résumés don't tell the whole story.
How It All Connected08 / 12

How It All Connected

These weren't separate projects — they were part of one system:

Marketing
Onboarding
Support
Feedback Systems
Product Team
Engineering
↺ Cycles back to Marketing — every loop feeds the next.

This loop doesn't happen by accident. It requires systems, ownership, and cross-functional alignment. At CoBlack, I helped design those connections.

Systems I Built09 / 12

Systems I Built

Support Model Document
Structure, tiers, response times, ownership
Escalation Matrix
Who decides what, and when
Ticket Prioritization Framework
Severity levels, impact scoring
Customer Feedback Tracker
Where insights go, how they're processed
Customer Journey Map
Awareness through advocacy
Email Templates
Onboarding, support, marketing, launch
Brand Guidelines
Visual identity, voice, messaging
Launch Checklist
Cross-functional coordination
Impact10 / 12

Impact

Foundation for Scale

By June 2026, CoBlack had launched and was acquiring customers. The systems I built enabled us to:

Handle customer inquiries without chaos.
Support knew who owned what, escalations were clear, response times were tracked.
Turn feedback into product improvements.
Customer insights went into a system, not a Slack thread. Product could prioritize with data.
Launch with coordinated messaging.
Marketing, product, and support all communicated the same story. Customers knew what to expect.
Onboard customers successfully.
Clear workflows meant new customers didn't get lost or confused on day one.
Work as one team, not silos.
Cross-functional processes forced alignment. When marketing planned a feature launch, support was ready. When customers had feedback, product listened.
Measurement in practice
Instagram analytics dashboard for the last 14 days showing 1,577 views, 70 interactions, top reel and story performance, audience age range, and profile activity
A 14-day Instagram snapshot — top-performing formats, audience age range, and skip-rate data used to decide what content to boost.
KPI and benchmark table defining formulas for follower growth percent, engagement rate for posts and reels, reach ratio, and click-through rate, each with a target benchmark
The KPI framework behind those numbers — formulas and benchmarks for growth, engagement, reach, and traffic, so "good" had a definition before launch.
Key Learnings11 / 12

Key Learnings

Systems thinking beats heroics
At a small startup, it's tempting to solve every problem by working harder. But the real wins come from designing systems that scale without needing heroics.
Build before you break
The best time to design support workflows is before you have 1,000 customers. Once you're in crisis mode, you're too late.
Alignment is a system, not a meeting
Cross-functional teams don't align just because the founders say so. You need shared processes, shared metrics, shared ownership.
Your first customer teaches you everything
Theory matters less than how real people interact with your product. Feedback systems matter because the first customer reveals what you got wrong.
Final Reflection12 / 12

At a 6-person startup, you can't afford specialists. Growth requires someone who can move fluidly across product, marketing, operations, and customer success.

This project reinforced something fundamental about startups: the difference between surviving and scaling isn't the idea or the technology. It's operational rigor.

Early-stage startups fail because they lack systems, not because they lack hustle. Building support workflows, feedback loops, customer journeys, and brand alignment before you need them is the difference between chaos and sustainable growth.

That founder mindset — realizing that your role is to build systems, not just execute — is something I'll carry into every role. Because growth doesn't come from working in one function. It comes from seeing how all the pieces need to fit together, and building the infrastructure to make that possible.