💰 Backstage raised a $2M seed round from Accel, OnDeck and PointOne Capital
Overview 🧭
Backstage is an invite-only super fan community app for creators to cultivate fan loyalty and monetize directly through their fans.
- I joined Backstage as their second product designer in their founding product team and aided in designing and building the very first version of the mobile app product from scratch.
- I worked closely with the founders on various aspects of the product, from user research to designing user flows and high-fidelity prototypes and iteratively improving the product based on user feedback.
- I was also instrumental in setting up the product design language and the brand language of the company.
My Projects ✍️
Confidentiality agreements prevent me from discussing most of my projects in-depth. However, brief overviews can be found at the bottom of the webpage.
The following are some of the major projects I worked on:
- Challenge creation for creators to launch exciting missions
- Hypelinks creation for creators to drive traffic to their links
- Improving the onboarding experience for creators and fans
- Designing the creator landing page template
- Researching and implementing coin reward mechanism to improve fan retention
- Designing pitch deck, company landing page and other marketing assets
The product is live on Google Play and the Apple App store and is currently used by ~10,000+ active users.
Live Product 💻
Links → Play Store | App Store
The Team 🤝
The following are some of the people I worked closely with during my time at Backstage:
- Co-founders → Nachiketas, Kevin
- Product Lead → Punit
- Product Designer → Karthik (Myself)
- I was the sole product designer for ~6 months post which Anumitha and Karan joined the design team.
- Engineering Team → Anirudh, Pranesh, Neelansh
- Quality Assurance → Daniel
The Product Design Process 💥
As a seed-funded startup in the early stages of development, our approach was characterized by a lean and iterative process.
Using the insights gathered from initial customer discovery and market research, we formulated hypotheses and developed initial prototypes. Through user testing and feedback, we made iterative improvements to the design to ensure it met the needs of our target customers.
User Research Process 🔍
- User Interviews → I would sit on these calls with the founders and the lead PM
- Understanding Pain-points → I would figure out some of the user pain-points and prioritize which problems to solve
- Competitor Analysis → I would research on what similar products are doing and how their users are feeling about their solutions
- Solution Hypothesis → I would collaborate with the PM and write one-pagers on how our solution would look like
Design Process ✍️
- Creating user flows
- Planning the information architecture
- Designing high-fidelity prototypes
- Testing them with potential users and collecting feedback
- Incorporating the feedback
- Tracking metrics to understand solution performance
Problem 😓
- Online content creators and their fans find it hard to form deeper relationships with each other.
- Creators also find it difficult to thrive financially in the long run and need a way to monetize directly and sustainably from their fans.
We were dealing with two types of user segment: The creators and their fans!
Solution💡
- We built an invite-only mobile app for creators to add their loyal fans and earn a premium for doing so.
- Creators and fans can directly engage with each other through various in-app features like Challenges, Hypelinks, Exclusives etc.,
- Fans can also purchase creator coins and get exclusive access to the creator and their offerings.
My Projects 🙋♂️
As one of the early designers in the team, I was involved in building the first few core set of features and saw the product grow from its first user to ~10,000 active users.
The following are the core product features that I worked on during my stint at Backstage 👇
1️⃣ Challenges
Challenges are ways for creator to create missions inside the Backstage app and reward their fans for participating!
2️⃣ Hypelink
Hypelinks are methods that help creators to drive more online traffic to their links through the help of their fans by duly rewarding them.
