(2022)

Investor & Artist experience

Fringe is a music investment platform that empowers fans to track and manage their investments in artists, consistently reconnecting them with the emotional motivations behind their support. We raised ~$4m dollars to build Robinhood, but for investing in musicians you love and believe in. Like angel investing, investing in emerging artists a high-risk, high-reward venture. My goal was to design a user-centric experience that maintains intrinsic value, even during financial downturns.

Role:

Lead Product Designer

Services:

Company:

Fringe 🔗

Team (3):

PM, Eng, Design (Me!)

CHALLENGE

The first challenge I faced was presenting complex, multi-year streaming and financial data in a quickly digestible format for our defined user persona. This data needed to be embedded in Fringe's portfolios, enabling users to track investments and understand their performance over time. Accuracy and transparency were key design benchmarks alongside ensuring that users could see their funds as available for withdrawal at any moment.

Given our unique revenue-sharing model, investors were expected to be in a net negative position for over 90% of the investment period. This posed a complex problem. It was crucial to detail the financials while highlighting the emotional connection fans had with their investments. My design objective was to deepen fans' engagement, making them feel integral to the songs they partly owned, surpassing traditional fandom and balancing the expected financial slumps.

GOALS & METRICS

In order to solve these challenges, I established four unique design goals:

1. Design a Music Portfolio: Adopt financial app conventions for an intuitive user experience.

2. Data Visualization: Simplify complex data into a clear narrative of asset growth.

3. Positive emotional response: Evoke positive emotions, even with negative returns.

4. Artist Portal: Enable artists to track performance and engage with investors.

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PROCESS

This sprint was heavy with team debates on whether to focus on the financially driven investors or to cater to the average music fan. Through user interviews, MVP testing, and multiple product iterations, I discovered that our users were not playing with dollar figures high enough to look at these investments through a financial lens, and that the return was more emotional than anything.

Step 1: Investment literacy interviews to understand user motivation

Step 2: Defined a user persona to inform future product decisions

Step 3: PRD alignment and definition of key goals and metrics

Step 4: Multiple rounds of Lo-fi product iterations for the portfolio, profile, and artist portal

Step 5: Delivered hi-fi designs for version 1.0

Step 6: Launched MVP to test user feedback

Step 7: Rapid iteration based on team & user feedback

Step 8: Refined data visualizations (this was a battle!)

Step 9: Delivered hi-fi designs for versions 2.0 to engineering while balancing engineering constraints and user needs

Step 10: Launched final profile, portfolio, and artist portal that supported cash out of funds via the application

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01 | Investor portfolio

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02 | Post-purchase investment tracking

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03 | Artist dashboard (mobile)

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04 | Artist dashboard (desktop)

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05 | Investor profile

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OUTCOME

The final product successfully balanced financial and emotional aspects, offering a unique investment experience with a conventional interface for users to track investments and engage emotionally with their favorite artists. I successfully transformed complex financial and streaming data into an easily digestible data framework which was adaptable across all artist listings, helping users understand their investments' performance. Additionally, the artist portal allowed musicians to track asset performance and connect with their investors. Artists raised ~$100k on the platform, deepened fan relationships, and repeatedly used the platform.

• Leveraged designs to raise ~$4m from top VCs (Manreesa Ventures, Clocktower, a16z,)

• Designed automated asset listing process which resulted in a 900% monthly increase in asset submissions and 1k+ assets waitlist

• Turned 5+ streams of complex distributor data into a single summary tracker of artist performance, ensuring it was intuitively understandable for our user persona

• Designed a portfolio that balanced traditional conventions with Fringe's unique music revenue share model

• Through multiple rounds of User Interviews, I define a user persona and created aligned product features

• Strategically influenced product roadmap to include non-financial elements such as user profile, artist achievements, and streaming

• 50+ artists actively tracked their listings performance, cashed out funds, and interacted with investors daily via the artist portal

Create investment account

06 | Final product

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Next Project

Client facing application (iOS)

Next Project

Client facing application (iOS)

Next Project

Client facing application (iOS)

Next Project

Client facing application (iOS)