Electiva Startup Web Product

Electiva is a Colombian startup that manages the paperwork for EV and hybrid owners to claim the IVA exclusion and income tax deduction available under Ley 1715 of 2014 and Ley 2099 of 2021. When the founders approached me, they had a name, a rough content outline built in PowerPoint, and no site. I designed and built the whole product alone: the marketing pages, a step-by-step explanation of the process, a real-time savings calculator, and a small content management system so the team can publish their own articles without touching code.

The first version launched in under two weeks. Since then I've added the articles section and its CMS, and kept the site running through several rounds of bug fixes and small improvements, most recently to how article formatting renders on the public site.

This was a freelance engagement for Electiva's two founders, Nestor and Marta, who needed a public-facing product before they could reasonably ask anyone to trust them with a tax process most people don't understand. There was no existing brand system, no wireframes, and no budget in the traditional sense: a flat freelance arrangement with a flexible deadline.

What I did have was a one-page outline the founders had put together in PowerPoint: which pages the site needed, and roughly what each one should say. That was the entire design brief. Everything else, the layout, the navigation structure, the visual language, and later the calculator and the CMS, was a decision I had to make and then explain, not one handed to me.

Colombia's EV tax incentives are legally real but practically invisible. The information is scattered across government sites and dense legal text, and the sites that try to explain it tend to be slow, cluttered, and unclear about what a visitor is even supposed to do next. Electiva's business depends entirely on people finding the site, understanding the benefit in the first minute, and trusting it enough to hand over their documents. If the site reads like every other confusing government-adjacent page, the business has no way to acquire a client.

I didn't run a structured competitive analysis or user interviews. What informed the design was years of using Colombian government and financial sites as a user myself: slow load times, navigation that buries the one thing you came for, forms that don't explain what happens next. Electiva's own competitors, other firms offering the same tax-benefit service, share the same pattern. I used that pattern as the thing to design against rather than naming and screenshotting individual sites.

In place of formal personas, I worked from the founders' own description of their client: anyone who owns an EV or hybrid and wants the tax benefit, with no assumption about age or how comfortable they are with technology. That's a wide, non-technical target, which is part of why the site avoids jargon and gets to a concrete number as fast as possible.

Most of the iteration on this project wasn't visual. The layout and color palette stayed close to the original direction throughout. What actually changed release over release was responsiveness and functionality: getting the site to behave correctly at every screen size, and getting the calculator and later the CMS to hold up under real use.

Electiva has been live since launch, and the founders have used it as their main channel for new client inquiries. Contact through the site's WhatsApp link and contact form has stayed in the hundreds since launch, though that number comes from the founders' own count of conversations rather than a tracked dashboard, since there's no analytics in place yet. The founders haven't run a dedicated marketing push, so this is closer to an early read than a settled result.

The articles section and its CMS shipped after the initial build, and the founders have started publishing through it directly. I've continued to maintain the site since launch, most recently fixing how article formatting rendered on the public pages, less a feature in itself than a signal that the site is actively kept rather than handed off and forgotten.

Working solo across design and development meant every UX decision also had to survive being explained to two non-technical founders who had their own instincts about the site. The navbar was the clearest example: the easy path was to build what was briefed. Making the case for something different, and having it land, taught me more about the job than the build itself did.

The clearest gap looking back is measurement. I stress-tested devices and browsers hard, but the only testing this site ever got from actual people was five friends and family members, and there is still no analytics in place to tell me what's working for a stranger landing on the site cold.