Equalto

Equalto helped sales operations teams manage commission plans without relying on engineers or maintaining elaborate spreadsheets. Sales reps connected their CRM, set up their commission structure, and could see exactly how their payouts were calculated.

The platform handled the logic that usually lives in a mess of Excel files shared over email: tiered rates, accelerators, splits, clawbacks. The goal was to make that auditable, transparent, and self-serve.

Commission plans are genuinely complex. They involve conditional logic, percentages of percentages, time periods, exceptions. The challenge was making that power available through a UI that a non-technical sales manager could actually use.

The tension was always between simplicity and flexibility. Make it too simple and you can't model real-world plans, make it too configurable and you've just built a worse spreadsheet.

There was also a trust problem specific to commissions: people's salaries depend on getting the numbers right. Every result needed to be explainable, not just correct.

I joined at the company's founding and eventually led a small team of three. The first months were intense: branding, website, early product sketches, decks, mockups, Figma prototypes. As the product matured our work shifted more toward the core platform and the design system.

I worked closely with engineering throughout. Most features went through a lot of iteration before we felt they handled the edge cases well, and that required staying close to how the calculations actually worked under the hood.

A lot of the design work was about making complex logic legible. We first had to get familiar with how sales commissions work, which was new territory for most of us. Just learning the terminology took some time.

We wanted to replace spreadsheets but we kept them inside the tool so users could use them to run the calculations.

The design system was built from scratch in Figma, in close collaboration with the engineering team. We iterated a lot and many pages did not even look consistent for months. In hindsight, we should have spent more time choosing the right library instead of building all components from scratch.

Outside the product I worked on the branding, the marketing website, and social content. The website started on Wix and later moved to Webflow, which gave us a lot more room to build something that actually matched the product's visual direction.

During its last few months, Equalto pivoted and tried out many spreadsheet-based approaches. We had to quickly react to the new needs and come out with new ideas and designs every other week.

Equalto Suresheet aimed to create editable calculators and sharable reports.

Equalto Chat was able to generate very basic spreadsheets with AI, in the early days of this tech.