Engagement note — 2022 · a three-month V0 sprint

SoraID

The gap

The product promised one-click KYC. The click existed — in the code. SoraID's verification engine was genuinely capable: identity checks composed and wired through a clean API. But the experience around it hadn't caught up to the engineering. By the time SoraID reached out, "one-click" was true for end users only if someone at Sora had first spent days making it true.

A seed-stage product, ahead of its own surface. SoraID was early — closer to zero than one, with deeply technical founders and an engine that outran its interface. Every client flow was configured by Sora's own team: which checks, in what order, wired how. At that stage this wasn't a growth bottleneck — there weren't enough clients to bottleneck. The gap was more fundamental: the product claimed self-serve, one-click verification, and couldn't yet show it. The work was to make the promise true outside the codebase.

The analogy that unlocked it: building a form in Typeform. The product's native concepts were engineer-shaped — endpoints, checks, wiring. The flow builder translated them into blocks in a pipeline: stack the verification steps the way you'd stack form questions, never touch the logic underneath, and see at every moment exactly what the end user will see. Familiar assembly on the surface, the real machinery below.

The one-click always lived in the code — the flow builder put it within reach: assemble the verification steps like a Typeform, and see exactly what the end user will.

What shipped

Three months, one artifact: the flow builder V0. Visual flow creation — pick the verification steps, see the order, understand what each one asks of the end user — designed so the first version could ship against the existing engine rather than waiting on a platform rewrite.

The promise, finally outside the codebase — a client picks a verification level, or builds their own, with no one at Sora in the loop.

SoraID was later acquired by Clear. This note records a three-month slice of the journey there — the moment the product's promise and its experience started saying the same thing.

Work from 2022. This records the thinking, not the current state.