Shoutout to my awesome co-founders, Valan, Jasper, and Henry
Along with 1 PM and 2 developers, I co-founded this app during my semester in LavaLab, USC’s premiere start-up incubator club. I led the end-to-end design of the app, product vision and roadmapping, user research and testing, and development handoff. To deliver our final deliverables, I iterated over design mock-ups and prototypes, brainstormed in all-hands meetings with my team, and created pitch decks every week.
On Demo Night, we pitched our start-up to a panel of VC's and received the top award (Judges' Choice).
Fans: Content creators currently rely on pre-recorded sessions to teach, which leave users confused and unsatisfied. Online platforms also offer limited courses in each vertical, which is not catered to the user’s exact interest.
Creators: Only the top 2% of creators make enough to create independently. The appeal of a creator career path is rising, yet there’s no infrastructure that supports the mid-tier creator when it comes to content monetization.
Fans + Creators: Both creators and fans lack interactive connections with each other and a platform to connect on an individual level.
Value propositions
Focusing on affordable pricing, in-depth conversations, discoverability of new creators, and connections with communities to differentiate from existing products on the market.
Branding
Iterations
When brainstorming for the name, logo, and typeface, we wanted to capture that our app would be a dynamic, lively, and welcoming community. Here are some of the iterations I brainstormed before landing on the final design.
Final
The final logo was designed to reflect the core ideas of our project which revolved around diversity, unity, delight, and just simply bringing people closer together. I also wanted to keep it minimalist and scalable to create brand recognizability.
Explore
The Explore page gives fans the options to both organically come across more content through short videos, filter for top-rated creators in specific verticals like fitness and investing, and keyword-search for sub-categories. All shorts and creators are also tagged with their niches like yoga, calisthenics, etc. to allow for more transparency and ease of use.
Booking
Fans can book 1:1 sessions with content creators through their profiles or through search results. They can view creators’ availabilities, add guiding questions specific to their niches, and any notes to creators. The creators’ session rates, durations, and ratings are also open information. Once the booking goes through, the session automatically shows up in both users’ schedules where they may join the video chats at the scheduled time.
Analytics & scheduling
We wanted to create more transparency and ease of use when it came to content creators’ monetization. The analytics tab includes detailed metadata in terms of prospective audience projections and revenue breakdown. Scheduling also allows creators to easily keep track of their calls and events in-app.
Community
To help creators diversify their revenue streams and foster close-knit communities, we curated a tiered loyalty program for fans. Users are enrolled in group chats with creators where they can continue interacting with them and like-minded fans. With the popularization of creator events, content creators can post giveaways, exclusive deals, virtual group lessons, livestreams, etc. as a form of fan service.
Key takeaways
Do not become too attached with any ideas
Throughout our 4-month long sprint, we’ve had to pivot countless times due to unforeseen problems. It’s easy for designers to become attached to their designs, but it is even more important to learn when to let them go for the betterment of the final product.
It takes both speaking up and active listening to have good team communication
Working in a cross-functional team of designer, PM, and developers, it’s easy to feel like your voice is lost when everyone has such great ideas to share. It’s only when we’re all letting each other feel heard, not being blindsided by our own expertise, and reminding ourselves that we’re working toward the same goal when we make the perfect team!
