Recur

Overview

Recur was a fast growth startup - raising a 55m Series A. We built bespoke NFT marketplaces for the world's biggest brands. Every marketplace had to look and feel unmistakably like the brand behind it but underlining components could not change. Here I worked closely with our product and engineering teams but also collaborated with the creative teams for the brands we worked with.

Building it 0 to 1

As the founding designer, I worked directly with the founders to take Recur from an idea to a launched product. To get there, I led design sprints with the team to finalize the MVP scope: what problem we were solving, who we were building for, and which features had to be in the first release. We wrote out our user personas, studied competitors like NBA Top Shot, Rarible, and OpenSea, and ranked every proposed feature by how many people would use it and how often.

The full sprint board: goals, personas, competitor research, and a deep dive on each feature.

Every proposed feature, ranked by how many people would use it and how often.

Core user flows

With the scope set, we walked through each core flow step by step, from a first purchase to cashing out. Under each step we noted the open questions and decisions, so they were settled before any screens were designed.

A new user signing up to buy their first NFT, with open questions under the steps that needed them.

A visitor who hasn't signed up yet but wants to buy.

A new user connecting a card during onboarding.

Buying a pack and opening it right away.

Listing an NFT for sale.

Withdrawing a balance to a bank account through Circle.

A marketplace for every brand

Early on, every launch was a one-off - custom design and build per brand, weeks or months each and a huge headache for everyone involved. We knew this wasn't sustainable so we figured out a design system approach that changed that into a token-based foundation where color, type, spacing, etc would get reskinned per brand, so a whole marketplace could be restyled to a new brand in hours instead of weeks. This is an effort I led alongside our frontend engineering team. As a result, we were able to take on more brands and eventually make the entire marketplace self serve for brands to reskin and update on their own.

A few of the branded marketplaces we shipped - every one distinct, all built on one system.

Branded marketplaces

Full-page designs for three of the branded marketplaces, each built on the same system.

NFTU

Star Trek

Top Gun

Impact