Copro

Copro is my own product: a compliance SaaS for condominiums, starting in Saskatchewan, then Alberta and Manitoba. Every province has its own act, its own forms and its own deadlines, and most small management companies and self-managed condos still track them by hand or in a spreadsheet.

The entry point is the estoppel certificate, the document a condo corporation must issue on every unit sale. Copro turns it into a few guided steps, then keeps every building on top of its other legal deadlines.

An estoppel certificate looks simple until you prepare one: a buyer's lawyer is waiting, the owner has to authorize the request, the fee is capped by law, and a dozen figures and attachments must be right, because the corporation is bound by what it certifies. Around it sit the reserve fund study, the annual general meeting and insurance renewals, each with its own legal timing.

The users are property managers who juggle several buildings, and volunteer board members who do this a few times a year. The product had to feel calm and obvious to both, while staying precise about the law.

I started with the brand: a Prairie palette (wine, cream, canola, sky and sage), Recoleta for titles and DM Sans for text. Then I built the design system on shadcn, with variables in light and dark, desktop and mobile modes, and checked contrast to AA in both themes.

On top of it, I designed the core flows, desktop and mobile. A dashboard that suggests the next step. A request page that tracks the certificate from the buyer's request to the signed PDF. A public form where the requester proves the owner's authorization and pays the capped fee. A sign and send step that shows exactly what the corporation is about to certify. A deadlines calendar generated from the act, and a table of what each province requires, where every rule links to its official text and is marked as checked or not.

I also built the library of states (empty results, skeletons, errors, read-only and offline banners); placing them on every screen is the next design pass. The marketing site at usecopro.com is live with a waiting list.

The product exists in design: the design system, the estoppel certificate flow, deadlines and documents, in desktop, mobile and dark mode. The marketing site is live. Next step is validation: interviews with management companies in Saskatoon and Regina, and the app gets built only if enough of them are ready to pay.

Designing a legal product means designing trust: show the source of every rule, say plainly what has not been checked yet, and never let a user certify a figure they haven't seen. Being my own client also taught me to cut scope early: one painful document first, the rest of the platform later.