Follows: Designing a Creator-Fi Social Trading Platform

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As the founding designer at Follows (2024), I was responsible for designing and launching the full product experience of a new Creator-Fi platform on Solana. The vision was to allow fans to buy, sell, and trade access to creators in real time, combining the familiarity of social apps with the trust and depth of financial platforms. My role was to build a scalable social-trading product that empowered creators to monetize influence while enabling fans to actively invest in them.

Building the Product Experience

I worked closely with the CEO and core team to define the product vision and translate it into clear user journeys. To ground the design in real-world needs, I researched SocialFi, DeFi, and creator-economy platforms, identifying usability gaps and opportunities. Based on these insights, I designed and shipped the complete end-to-end flows for:

• Trading seamless creator token buying and selling

• Wallet integrations Solana-native flows that made blockchain interactions accessible

• Gated content including vaults, chats, and audio rooms

• Referral incentives to accelerate adoption and community growth

In addition, I led the design of complex dashboards such as portfolio tracking, social insights, and real-time analytics ensuring that even data-heavy modules felt intuitive, clear, and engaging. Along the way, I established the visual and interaction language for the platform and set up scalable workflows to keep design, product, and engineering tightly aligned.

Outcome and Impact

We shipped Follows.app from zero to launch, quickly scaling to more than 1,500 active users and becoming the second most-used SocialFi product within months. The platform’s sleek social interface, powerful dashboards, and real-time trading mechanics made blockchain interactions feel familiar, while also deepening engagement between creators and their fans.

By creating a cohesive design system and scalable workflows, I enabled the team to iterate rapidly without sacrificing quality. Follows positioned itself as a pioneer in Creator-Fi, bridging creators and finance through a product that was both intuitive and innovative.

Branding the Platform

Beyond the product, I also led the rebranding of Follows, evolving its identity from an early-stage look into a polished, scalable brand system. The new identity was designed to work seamlessly across product, marketing, and community touchpoints, bringing clarity, trust, and energy to the platform. It captured both the financial depth of trading and the social accessibility that made Follows unique cementing its position as a leading SocialFi platform.