Maven Coalition

Launching a New Media Platform

Maven Coalition was a startup aimed at creating a media platform for professional publishers, journalists, community leaders, and niche audiences. The founders, leveraging their experience in building vibrant fan communities on previous sports media networks, aimed to assemble a coalition of medium-sized publishers with active, engaged communities. The goal of the platform was to blend user-generated content with premium content, creating a unique and engaging user experience.

The Maven platform logo I designed in the early phase.

My Role

As a product designer, I spearheaded all design-related initiatives, including branding, logo creation, UX/UI design, and front-end development. In the project's initial phase, I also took on the responsibility of hiring designers. Working in collaboration with developers, the network team, and executives, I played a pivotal role in driving the project forward.

Product Design・Prototyping・Design Style Guide ・UX Engineering・Logo Design

The Launch Journey

Basic Assumptions and Quick Start

Drawing on past studies of Scout.com and Rivals.com, and leveraging our experience, the development team began constructing basic structures and pages. Concurrently, I developed high-fidelity comps for presentations to investors and clients.

The team collected and sorted out the minimum information about the product so that we all could start working quickly.

The early mockups created for investors and publishers were instrumental in visualizing the potential of our media product, serving as a tangible representation of our vision and capabilities.

Front-end Design

While kept iterating the design mockups with another UX designer, I focused my efforts on front-end development tasks, creating themes, enhancing components to reach production standards, and writing code that reflected the visual design principles in the final product and its user experience. I played a key role in fixing layout issues and improving the design in code across multiple browsers and devices.

Release the Beta Product

at the Founders’ Summit

Eight channels/publishers joined the beta product release in the summer of 2017. In less than a year, the product had attracted over 300 publishers and received about 90 million unique clicks per month. Today, as of 2021, Maven (now known as the Arena Group) has grown to 150 million unique visitors and hosts well-known brands like Sports Illustrated and TheStreet.

Large Channel Examples

KidsActivity Blog
AllHipHop
The Black Business School

Maven MVP product on the mobile phone image

After the launch...

In the dynamic environment of this fast-paced startup, I leaned heavily on my experience and intuition for design decisions. The collaborative spirit among the teams and the vibrant developer-centric culture were deeply enriching. This synergy facilitated a streamlined production process, enabling us to rapidly launch the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I take great pride in having contributed to building a product from the ground up amid the challenging yet exhilarating startup atmosphere.

After launching, I teamed up with an engineer to develop our design system, inspired by Material-UI from our MVP. While the initial version wasn't complete, it ignited a strong interest in design systems for me.

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