Brolyz
Brolyz is a social platform for investors to share insights, showcase portfolios, and connect around financial ideas. I was involved in the product design end to end, from early research and ideation through wireframing and key product decisions, all the way to the first MVP launch.
Social Finance (2024-25)
Project Overview
Client: Brolyz & VestraDAO
Industry: Social Media, Finance
Project: Web & Mobile App
Timeline: Oct 2024 - May 2025
My Role: Product Designer
You can explore the features, process, decision making, and my involvement in more detail through the visuals here and the extended writeup on Medium. This link goes to Medium
Early User Onboarding
I designed an invite based onboarding flow to control early access while driving organic growth through existing user networks.
The flow was intentionally simple:
Completing a profile unlocked one free invite, encouraging immediate user investment.
A persistent invite card in the sidebar allowed each user to send up to three additional invites, creating a lightweight viral loop without overwhelming the system.
To ensure a high quality initial cohort, we activated users from an existing waitlist of pre-registered users. This seeded the platform with already motivated participants and accelerated early engagement.
As a result, we successfully onboarded our first wave of users and nurtured an active community, including a Telegram group that grew to 1,000+ members during the initial phase.
I researched different approaches to granting early platform access and presented the findings to the team. After collaborative discussions, we finalized the invitation flow that balanced exclusivity, engagement, and community quality.
Challenge & Approach
The core business challenge was increasing user engagement while building trust within the platform.
We were designing for two distinct groups, novice and experienced investors, each with different expectations around complexity, control, and credibility. At the same time, users were already active on X, where sharing and discussion felt natural. The challenge was not introducing social behavior, but shifting that behavior onto our platform.
Our platform was specifically trader focused, offering users personal portfolios and the ability to share trade posts. These posts allowed them to showcase insights and connect their trades to major exchanges like Binance, Kraken, and OKX. The goal was to make sharing and discussion feel native to the trading experience, giving users reasons to engage here rather than elsewhere.
As a product designer, I focused on reducing friction in this transition. Rather than forcing new behaviors, I designed features that mirrored familiar habits while highlighting the added value of our platform. This included:
Embedding social interactions directly into the trading and portfolio flows
Enabling trade posts to link seamlessly to real trading activity across exchanges
Reinforcing trust through transparency and clear presentation of trade insights
By iterating based on user feedback, we created an engaging and credible experience that encouraged users to actively participate, share their trades, and connect with others within the platform.
Notification System Design
To drive user engagement, I designed a notification system that was consistent across both web and mobile platforms, and integrated into the Design System for scalability and consistency.
Key decisions:
User Focused: Single and grouped notifications reduce cognitive load; visuals and avatars provide social proof.
Content Aware: Mind posts vs. trade posts handled differently to highlight insights and ROI without clutter.
Collaborative: Iterated with product, engineering, and business teams to align engagement goals with infrastructure limits.
Scalable and Efficient: Event driven architecture, batched scheduling, and modular components integrated into the Design System for web and mobile.
User Research and Feedback: Mapped key engagement moments, portfolio updates, trade posts, and social interactions; to understand when and how users wanted to be notified.
The result: a lightweight, intuitive system that keeps users connected, drives participation, and scales cost effectively.
Link 👉 Read more about the process on Medium
Learnings & Outcomes
Designing early onboarding taught me that momentum comes from immediate value, low friction, and starting with high intent. By tying profile completion to invite access and adding a persistent invite card, we created a lightweight viral loop that helped seed early growth across web and mobile.
A key challenge was shifting social behavior from platforms like X into our product. Instead of building a separate social layer, I learned that engagement works best when embedded directly into trading and portfolio flows. This kept it concise, still shows impact, and puts your thinking first while the product outcome supports it.
