The world's largest 2-sided marketplace for creators to submit their work to film festivals and publishers, including HBO, Sundance and Tribeca.
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Introduction
Until it was acquired by Backstage in 2021, I was the lead designer of a global platform (1M+ MAU) for filmmakers & film festivals, connecting millions of users and forcing our IMDb-owned competitor, WithoutABox, to shut down after 5 years of ruthless competition.
Working directly with the CEO founder and daily with the engineering, CS, and marketing teams, it was my responsibility to create end-to-end designs for hundreds of conceptual & original features, dashboards, internal advertising, cart & payment processing systems, a ticket selling platform, extensive work on the company's patented digital entry & judging SaaS, and an innovative new subscription model called "Gold" which more than doubled the company's ARR.
My work here was extremely varied, including:
- 0 → 1 design system & UI component library
- Project management
- End-to-end UX Design
- Email, poster, social media graphic designs
- UI Engineering (Rails, ReactJS)
- Application testing with Capybara, Selenium and Playwright
The app was updated weekly (sometimes daily) with features that could range in complexity from simple pages to multi-device experiences. It taught me a lot about creating templates and systems that could keep up with our rapid pace of product iteration.
Introduction
Getting accepted to certain events on the platform made an artists work eligible for special awards, like the coveted Academy Award. To better highlight these events, I designed a system of badges that could be displayed prominently on an event's card and profile page automatically.
My work
I designed, illustrated, and did multiple iterations of the badge design, in addition to guiding the complete UX, including: the placement of the badges, what events were badge qualifying, how the badges displayed on smaller screen sizes.
Before & after (search results)
Before (profile pages)
After (profile pages)
Results
Before badges were added, there was no easy way to visually identify which festivals were award qualifying and which were not. You had to either "just know" yourself, or do extensive research to determine whether or not you wanted to submit your work to that event.
After this project was delivered, artists using the platform could easily identify the events they wanted to submit their work to and didn't have to context switch between our app and Google anymore. We noticed around a 15% increase in submission rates to award qualifying events.
$11.99 Monthly subscription service, adopted by more than 30% of monthly active users.
View this project liveIntroduction
As the platform gained market dominance (going from around 60,000~ MAU to more than 1M MAU), it made sense to look for revenue in other ways. Rather than trying to attract new users to the platform, we recognized there was value we could provide to the users we already had.
Adding a $11.99 monthly subscription service for artists got them access to discounted pricing from hundreds of festivals (which we incentivized to opt-in to the new program by offering new benefits like improved placement in search results, a custom badge to highlight their status across the platform, ), resulting in a valuable subscription service that was not subject to the same fees as the platforms primary revenue stream (making a small percentage of each transaction).
300,000 users signed up in the first year, resulting in about $3.5M in new revenue each month. $42M per year.
This innovative subscription model completely transformed the business.
My responsibilities
Design lead, including UX design, design research, brand development, and marketing collateral.
Timeline
March 2018 - September 2018 (About 6 months)
Results
Gold was an incredibly successful product that combined our existing PMF with our users desire to save money and submit their work to more events.
View liveGold brand development
Robinhood Gold was a major source of inspiration during brand development.
I worked with a graphic designer to conceptualize the Gold badge and guide its integration onto the platform.
End-to-end UX Design
Gold was a very large feature that required the consideration of multiple user personas (filmmakers, festivals, corporations, agencies) and new UI across more than 10 pages of the app, including:
- Net-new cancellation flow (x2)
- New category page for "Gold" festivals
- New Search index filters & card updates
- Net-new marketing pages (x2)
- Profile page updates (x2)
- Cart updates
- Theme development
- Press release copy, emails, and digital assets
Cancellation UX (Version 1 - not shipped)
Cancellation UX (Version 2 - Shipped)
UI overview
I worked directly with engineers to manage the delivery of this project. Overall, the feature was considered a huge success and is still a major revenue stream for the business today.
