Bustem: taking brand protection from spreadsheets and Slack threads to one product, from zero
Bustem finds copycat listings, stores and ads selling knock-offs of a brand’s products, and gets them taken down.
I joined in November 2024 as the founding product designer, when there was no product yet. When I left in May 2026, it protected 150+ brands.
- Role
- Founding Product Designer
- Timeline
- Nov 2024 – May 2026
- Team
- Founder, COO, CTO, enforcement agents
- Platform
- Web app, B2B SaaS
What I did
- Designed the product from zero: the client app and the enforcement tools behind it
- Worked directly with the enforcement team and with clients
- Led product design and connected the processes behind it, from automations to reporting
Problem
Enforcement lived in a dozen apps
Copycats cost brands more than sales: trust, reviews from buyers who never bought the real thing, search rankings.
Fighting them was just as scattered. Cases lived in Excel, Slack, Trello and more, and every platform had its own form, rules and clock: Amazon answered in 1–2 business days, TikTok and Temu in 6–10. So things got lost, nothing was tracked properly, and every miss cost time and money. The product’s job was to bring all of it into one place.
Constraints
Designing for both sides of the table
Bustem has two kinds of users: the enforcement agents who do the takedowns, and the brands who pay for them. I met with both regularly, working alongside the founder, COO and CTO, so every screen was checked against the person doing the work and the person paying for it.
Enforcement agents
Do the takedowns, every day, at volume.
Brands
Pay for it, and want to see every case.
Options and decisions
Nobody wanted another tool. They wanted it done.
The first version was a self-serve tool called Busted.AI: paste your store’s link, see the copycats and what they cost you, pay to file the takedowns. We tried it briefly and learned fast that brand owners don’t want another piece of software to work around. They want the problem gone.
So Busted became Bustem, a managed service. Our team does the enforcement; the product shows the brand what’s happening and asks them for one thing: approve or deny.
A real product before there was a backend
Our tech wasn’t there yet: there was no backend for most of what the product promised. Instead of waiting, I designed the product as if it existed and wired the gaps with automations.
When a brand pressed Report on an infringer, it felt instant to them. On our side, a Slack notification went out, the right person got pinged, a card was added to the platform and tracked through the takedown, and the brand was notified and saw every step in the app.
- 1A brand presses Report
- 2A Slack alert goes out
- 3The right person is pinged
- 4A card is added and tracked
- 5The takedown
- 6The brand sees it in the app
Enforcement in batches, not one by one
The work that mattered most to clients was making enforcement as easy as possible for them. Instead of reviewing copycats one at a time, they review them in batches, sorted into categories, with the most damaging infringers first, and they can set rules once so the rest runs on its own.
Batches
Review many copycats at once.
Categories
Sorted, so alike cases go together.
Worst first
The most damaging infringers on top.
Rules
Set once, and the rest runs on its own.
The full flow
One journey, from the landing page to the takedown
The work went beyond the app itself. I designed the whole journey: the landing page, onboarding, the enforcement workflows, and the reporting clients come back to.
Onboarding had two jobs pulling against each other: be short and interesting for the brand, and still collect everything we need to file takedowns for them, from trademarks to authorised sellers. A long wizard became a few steps inside the app, with a checklist that keeps going in the background.
first version
A 9-step wizard before you could see anything.
what we built
A few steps inside the app, and a checklist for the rest.
Impact
From zero to 150+ brands while I was there
The platform became the daily tool for the enforcement team, gave the founders the numbers they needed, and gave clients full visibility of every case.
Pushback is missing information
I aim for the answer that is both the most useful and the best-looking. When a design gets pushed back on, I treat it as context I didn’t have yet: I find out what the team knows, research it properly, and come back with a version that holds up.