Context
Owner-operators and small fleets live on cash flow. They haul a load, invoice the broker, then wait 30, 60, sometimes 90 days to get paid. That gap can park a truck and put a one-person business under in weeks. Factoring closes the timing gap — TBS buys the invoice and pays the operator now, then collects from the broker later.
But the process to get paid was the opposite of fast. It ran on faxed paperwork and manual data entry, with no way to see where an invoice stood once it left your hands. Operators submitting a schedule had to trust a black box, then call in to ask where their money was. The people doing this weren’t at a desk — they were behind the wheel or running a small back office between dispatch calls, and the tools assumed neither.
TBS GetPaid was the answer: a mobile app that let an operator submit an invoice schedule from the cab, watch it move through approval in real time, and stop wondering when they’d be paid.
My role
I was the founding product designer. I partnered with the CEO, CTO, and product manager to take GetPaid from nothing to a shipped mobile app. Alongside the product work, I helped stand up the design practice itself — defining product development cycles, establishing career levels for designers, and putting a regular critique process in place.
What shipped
The hard part wasn’t the screens — it was everything behind them. TBS ran on legacy invoicing software and thin data records, mid-way through replacing fax with digital. A submitted invoice touched multiple departments — credit-line availability among them — before money moved, and none of that was visible to the operator. The design had to make an opaque, multi-step back-office process feel like one legible flow on a phone.
We started by mapping how operators actually factored with TBS — the real jobs-to-be-done, and where time and trust were lost. Then we ran a usability study to pin down the core task: submitting an invoice schedule cleanly, from the road.
The app centered on that submission flow and the status visibility that followed it — turning “fax it and call to check” into “submit it and watch it move.”
Outcome
Adoption shifted hard toward the app. Today the majority of TBS customers factor through GetPaid daily, with over $16 million factored through the mobile experience and nearly 30,000 credit-line checks run — each one a future load TBS can confidently fund.
The lessons were the durable kind: iterate often, ship “good” instead of waiting for perfect, listen past what customers say to what they do, and remember the user isn’t you. The honest weak point was that the experience still leaned on back-office processes we couldn’t fully digitize yet — every manual step behind the app was a ceiling on how fast the front end could feel.