Case Study
Figma to Production in 90 Days
How K2 Venture Partners replaced a scattered offshore team with a smaller, faster onshore crew and shipped a production-grade agentic AI platform in a single quarter.
Agentic AI Small Business Coaching Platform
The engagement in numbers
- 90Days to ProductionFigma to live SaaS
- 3Verticals LiveFrom a single codebase
- 90%+Test CoverageAcross the platform
- 0Content LostIn LMS migration
The Challenge
ManifestEd had deep domain expertise and a clear product vision, but the execution wasn’t there yet.
No Production Application
The product existed only as Figma mockups. Despite months of work with an offshore team, no working software had been delivered.
Scattered Offshore Engineering
A team of full-time contract engineers spread across time zones was shipping slowly, producing inconsistent quality, and operating without technical leadership.
Content Trapped in Docebo
Hundreds of hours of coaching sessions, training courses, assessments, and staff materials were locked inside Docebo’s enterprise LMS with no clear migration path.
Multi-Vertical Ambitions, No Platform Strategy
ManifestEd needed to serve pet care, deathcare, and salon industries, each with custom branding, content, and AI coaching. They had no architecture to support this without tripling the codebase.
The K2 Engagement
K2 Venture Partners embedded as fractional CPO and CTO from day one, owning product strategy, technical architecture, and engineering execution end-to-end.
Fractional Product & Technical Leadership
K2’s founding partners, Kris Ciccarello (20+ years in product architecture and AI/ML) and John Knific (15+ years in B2B SaaS product and GTM), stepped in as the product and technical leadership team ManifestEd needed but couldn’t justify hiring full-time at their stage.
This meant making hard calls early: defining what to build first and what to defer, choosing a technical stack that could scale across verticals, and replacing the scattered offshore team with a smaller, focused onshore crew that shipped faster with higher quality.
Meridian-Powered Delivery
K2 deployed Meridian, their proprietary AI development platform, to accelerate every stage from idea to production. Meridian integrates directly with the partner’s codebase and operates across four AI-powered roles:
Product Manager
Syncs with application code and uses product management agents to design, shape, and estimate new functionality
Architect
Facilitates architectural planning, technical design decisions, and system integration, all grounded in the existing codebase
Designer
Applies proven UX patterns with deep expertise in AI-first application interfaces
Engineer
Writes production-ready code at high velocity using agentic coding workflows
Every feature was shaped before code was written. This fed into managed 2-week build cycles where scope was fixed, progress was visible, and nothing shipped without meeting quality gates including 90%+ test coverage.
Complex LMS Migration
One of the highest-risk workstreams was migrating ManifestEd’s entire content library off Docebo. This included hundreds of hours of coaching sessions, multi-module training courses, assessments with scoring, staff workbooks, and progress tracking data.
K2 built a custom LMS with a flexible content model supporting video, audio, documents, markdown, presentations, surveys, and assessments. The full Docebo library was migrated without losing a single piece of content.
Multi-Vertical Platform Architecture
Rather than building separate applications for each industry, K2 architected a white-label multi-tenant system that powers multiple branded verticals from a single codebase. Each vertical gets its own custom branding, AI companion personality, industry-specific metrics, onboarding flow, and independent Stripe billing. The architecture is designed so new verticals can be spun up rapidly without additional engineering work.
The Doggurus
Pet Care
Flagship vertical. First to market, 1,500+ members
Impart
Deathcare
Expansion vertical, live and growing
LumariPro
Salon & Beauty
Expansion vertical, live and growing
What Was Built
The full platform that shipped to paying customers.
AI Companion
Business assistant trained on real coaching sessions and financial data, with personality and tone tuned per industry vertical. It pulls in actual QuickBooks numbers to give owners specific advice on margins, staffing costs, and growth.
Learning Management System
Complex content hierarchy with plans, courses, and items supporting video, audio, documents, assessments, and progress tracking.
Business Intelligence
KPI dashboard with QuickBooks integration for automated financial analysis and AI-generated insights.
Coaching & Events
Private 1-on-1 coaching, group sessions, recurring event scheduling, and session recording.
Staff Management
Team onboarding, training assignment and tracking, role-based access control, and progress monitoring.
Subscription Billing
Multi-tier subscription system with Stripe integration, trial management, and add-on features.
Admin & Configuration
Full admin panel for vertical management, onboarding flow configuration, custom fields, and platform-wide settings.
Results
- Time to Production
- Figma to live customers in 90 days
- Platform Reach
- 3 industry verticals from a single codebase
- LMS Migration
- Entire Docebo library migrated, zero content loss
- Code Quality
- 90%+ test coverage across the platform
- Delivery Cadence
- 2-week build cycles with a smaller, onshore team
- Vertical Expansion
- 3 live today, architected to add more without new engineering
I want to emphasize how impressed our team has been with your approach to partnership. You’ve met this moment in our journey with thoughtfulness and genuinely partner-centric thinking.
We’d love to learn about what you’re building.
Let’s talk about your product and where you’re trying to go.