Hey there!
Nice to meet you :)
I help organizations invent, design, and scale the businesses of tomorrow.
Who I Am 👋🏻
I’m Nick Sohriakoff: a Venture Builder, CX leader, and Product Designer with nearly a decade of experience helping startups, Fortune 500, and Global 1000 companies grow, innovate, and scale new businesses from scratch.
My sweet spot is where customer experience, solution design, and business strategy intersect, helping aging companies and passionate entrepreneurs stay relevant and become leaders in their market. I believe the best ventures are born when we deeply understand a customer’s problem or goals, and design something truly meaningful that helps them overcome that pain or attain those goals.
My Journey 🌊
I started my career as a Presentation Designer, using storytelling as my superpower to help venture teams unlock and craft a compelling narrative to pitch to their board for funding. When I wasn’t designing presentations, I was also a Product Designer, where I learned to craft intuitive, human-centered experiences for software, service, and other types of solutions grounded in rigorous customer research insights throughout dozens of Incubations. From there, I advanced to become a CX Manager, advising national venture teams on CX strategy, best practices, and mentoring emerging designers and researchers. Most recently, I’ve been a Lead Entrepreneur in Residence at Mach49, where I’ve partnered with corporate clients to incubate and launch disruptive ventures — from digital platforms to new service models.
Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of working across industries including energy, healthcare, manufacturing, staffing, real estate, construction, R&D, automotive, technology, and consumer services. This breadth has taught me that while industries differ in terms of market opportunities, the principles of human-centered innovation and venture building apply everywhere.
And I’m just getting started 💪🏻
My Process ⚙️
How I Build Ventures
Every new venture I work on follows its own unique journey — from spark to scale. One thing they all share is a similar process to reach a successful outcome: de-risk critical barriers, validate desirability and feasibility of the product/service, and ensure viability of the new business.
01
Define the
Opportunity
Goal
Explore bold opportunity spaces and generate high-potential ideas
What I Do
Facilitate creative workshops, analyze market trends, and reframe problems to unlock new directions
Skills
- Workshop facilitation
- Opportunity mapping & Challenge Statement
- Market, domain, & trend analysis
- Project programming
02
Find the
Customer Pain
Goal
Hypothesize and validate real customer pains and desires
What I Do
Conduct deep customer research, synthesize data to uncover unmet needs, and map the end-to-end journey.
Skills
- Test planning
- Interview moderation & note-taking
- Ethnography
- Survey design & analysis
- Persona development
- Journey mapping
- Synthesis (Analog / AI)
03
Create the
Solution
Goal
Determine the strongest value proposition via concept and prototype tests and quickly refine ideas to find what truly resonates with users
What I Do
Rapidly build and test concepts/prototypes, uncover core pain + product fit, and determine MVP and product vision.
Skills
- Value proposition creation
- Prototyping
- Service design
- Product vision and roadmapping
- Storytelling
04
Design the
Business
Goal
Align customer desirability and product feasibility with business viability and scalability.
What I Do
Shape business models, create financial frameworks, and develop operational plans and go-to-market strategies that can stand inside a corporate environment.
Skills
- Business model design
- Financial modeling
- Operational planning & execution
- GTM planning
- Growth strategy
What Drives Me 🚀
I’ve helped build and launch dozens of ventures, and not all of them are as successful or impactful as they intended from the jump. From those experiences, I’ve developed strong beliefs and core principles that form the foundation of my approach to product and business design. I believe innovation works best when it’s:
Human-Centered: grounded in real customer insight
Strategic: designed with scalability and viability in mind, while also supporting the larger goals of the core business
Collaborative: built with passionate, dedicated people from cross-functional teams
Impact-Oriented: not just growth for growth’s sake, but transforming businesses (and people’s lives) to create lasting value
Connected: knowing that the best ideas come when teams are having fun, building real connections, and celebrating the process as much as the outcomes
These values shape how I approach every project — and how I help organizations go beyond the core to build what’s next.
