Bear (YC F25)
Team
Janak Sunil (CEO)
Siddhant Paliwal (CTO)
Role
Solo Designer
Timeframe
June 2025 - January 2026
At Bear, I was the solo designer working across product, marketing, and growth at a Y-Combinator backed startup building in one of the fastest-moving spaces in tech. I contributed to growing Bear from $1K to $60K MRR with 50+ clients, through a $1.2M pre-seed and $3.2M seed round at a $40M valuation.
Product Snapshot
What is GEO?
Search Changed and Nobody Told the Marketers
As more people turn to AI search like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity for answers, the rules of marketing are changing. Unlike traditional search which returns a list of blue links, AI gives a single confident answer. If you're not in the answer, you don't exist to that user. The $90B SEO industry was built for a world of blue links and page rankings. Now, it is being replaced by Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the practice of optimizing your online presence so that AI models learn to trust, cite, and recommend you. Bear is the platform helping companies do exactly that.
What does Bear do?
Bear with Us
Bear helps companies show up on AI search by giving marketing teams visibility into how AI models are talking about their brand. Bear tracks which prompts surface their company and analyze which sources AI cites. Bear also provides tools to generate AI-ready content, automate PR outreach, and convert AI-driven traffic into leads.
When I joined Bear, most marketers had never heard of GEO. They had no visibility into whether AI was mentioning their brand, no data to act on, and no framework for even thinking about it. Because of this, my time at Bear was guided by this one question:
How do you make an entirely new concept feel understandable and actionable to people encountering it for the first time?
I created Bear's launch video entirely using AI creative tools as part of my ongoing exploration of generative AI for visual production and brand storytelling. It's an area I'm actively building on through my own creative studio TSUKI alongside client work.
Feature #01: Dashboard & Analytics
How Much Metric is Too Much Metric?
The first version of Bear's product did what a lot of early B2B tools do — it showed everything. Every metric we thought a marketer might want, all at once, across a cluttered navigation that made it hard to find anything quickly.
When we started reviewing session recordings with real clients, the problem became obvious. New users would land on the dashboard and stall. They didn't know where to look. The sources analysis, which showed which websites AI was citing when recommending brands felt like a spreadsheet without context. Users had no mental model for what an "AI citation" even meant, so seeing a list of URLs with citation counts read as noise.
Dashboard & Analytics (Before)
The core issue was that we were designing around what we thought users would care about, not what they actually needed to know first.
After working through session recordings and direct client feedback, I redesigned around a single guiding question: what does someone need to understand in the first 60 seconds? For a new user, that meant one thing: Is AI mentioning my brand, and is that improving over time?
Everything else was secondary.
Dashboard (After)
Sources (After)
The redesign pulled the most actionable signal to the surface: visibility score, mention trend, top prompts driving AI traffic. The sources analysis was reframed around intent and source type. Instead of a raw data table, it became a prioritized list of the sources AI trusted most, with outreach built directly into the view.
Feature 2: Website Redesign & Launch
Redesigning the Front Door
As the product developed, the original site increasingly became too narrow as Bear expanded from pure GEO into a broader "marketing stack for AI agents" covering analytics, content, PR, and lead generation. The site needed to tell that story clearly and quickly to visitors who were landing cold.
Standing out also meant having a distinct identity as the GEO space became more competitive. Our primary clients were marketing teams, not engineers, and most of our competitors leaned into the cold, technical aesthetic common in AI tooling: dark interfaces, dense data, lots of jargon which was not working for our client base.
To build a brand that felt approachable and human for a non-technical audience, I developed a new visual language using paintings as a central motif. Rather than the sharp, futuristic look typical of AI companies, the aesthetic was warmer and more editorial. It gave Bear a distinct presence in a sea of look-alike AI tools and made the product feel less intimidating to the marketers we were trying to reach.
The redesign was structured the page around Bear's four pillars, each with product UI to ground the claim. The visual language was tightened to feel more credible at the fundraising stage: cleaner, more confident, with social proof and a clear call to action.
The redesigned site pulled over 30,000 visits and supported Bear's successful raise of a $3.2M seed round at a $40M valuation.
Misc
Other 50% of Work
At an early-stage startup, my work didn't just end at product design.
I wrote blog content to help establish Bear's voice in the GEO space (read here!). I built a generative AI workflow to produce custom cover visuals for blog posts at scale, something that would have taken hours per post now ran in minutes. I created pitch decks for fundraising and sales. I joined sales calls and did outreach alongside the team to understand what clients actually needed, which fed directly back into product decisions.
Pitch Deck and Meta Ads
AI Graphic Workflow (Fuser, Midjourney, Kling, etc)
This kind of range isn't for everyone. But for a startup growing fast in a brand-new category, having a designer who could move fluidly between product, brand, content, and growth without needing a handoff was the point.
Bonus
Appendix
This kind of range isn't for everyone. But for a startup growing fast in a brand-new category, having a designer who could move fluidly between product, brand, content, and growth without needing a handoff was the point.
Conclusion
Lessons Learned
Data isn't clarity.
Showing users everything isn't the same as showing them what matters. The most impactful design work I did at Bear wasn't adding — it was cutting, reordering, and reframing until the product answered the question a user actually had when they opened it.
Designing in a new category means earning understanding first.
GEO didn't have established conventions. Users couldn't reference prior experience to make sense of what they were seeing. That meant every screen had to do more work — not just showing data, but building the mental model that made the data legible. Good UX in a new market is half product design, half education.
AI doesn't replace the designer — it multiplies them.
From the blog cover workflow to the launch video, AI tools let me produce work that would have required a full team. The skill isn't in the tools — it's knowing what quality looks like, and being able to direct and edit toward it. That's still design.
Next Project
Jot
