Role

Co-founder

Duration

1.5 years

Product

crtd is an application to discover what your friends are reading / watching / listening to
it works by connecting your spotify, apple music, goodreads and letterboxd accounts or by sharing links directly via SMS

Design process

After reading about the Theory of Maximum Taste I knew I needed to re-evalaute the content I was consuming but couldn't find a place to easily discover long form content. I had a feeling others might be experiencing the same. To test the idea I created a newsletter with links of content my friends enjoyed.
Each week a group of friends would text me 3 of the favorite things they've consumed, I'd aggregate the links and send them out on Sunday using Mailchimp
Below is how the newsletter looked:

There was a lot of manual work with the newsletter, and reaching out to people to remind them to send links wasn't ideal. I decided to automate the process to make a more scalable solution. The second iteration involved creating the UX through SMS and a webpage. During the onboarding process users would get sent a contact card that they could send links to. Each week they'd receive a text message with a url to a weekly digest. This worked okay for awhile but didn't have enough feedback loops for users to continue to share links

On the final iteration we added integrations with Spotify, Apple Music, Goodreads and Letterboxd to pull data from those services. I still believe that SMS is the most low friction UX for a product like this. Thats why the core of the product remained the same -- sharing links via text message. The result was a dynamic link-in-bio page users could use to display the content they're consuming as well as discover what people they follow are into.

Reflection

I believe there's an opportunity in building on top of messenger apps as the primary interface for social applications, as those are the applications people open everyday. With crtd we were eventually planning out building support for Telegram to cover the European market and Whatsapp for LATAM market. During this time we received over 26,000 submissions.

Other assets

Widget for iOS

Onboarding video

Personal invitation cards to invite users

Billboard Campaign in NYC