A creator membership platform built to recover royalty revenue and give NFT creators the tools to grow their business on their own terms. Senior Product Designer → CCO, one year. Led a team of 15 across design, content, and marketing over one year.
2022
SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGNER
VP OF DESIGN, CCO
PRODUCT STRATEGY
PRODUCT DESIGN
BRAND IDENTITY
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
When NFT platforms began making royalty payments optional, creators lost a primary revenue stream overnight. It wasn't malicious; platforms were competing for buyers, and royalties created friction. But creators are the actual acquisition mechanism for new users in Web3. Someone hears about NFTs, investigates, finds a collection that appeals to them, and mints. That discovery loop depends entirely on creators being able to sustain their work. Undermining their revenue didn't just hurt creators; it threatened the pipeline that brings new users into the space.
To give NFT creators the tools to protect their income, reward their community, and grow a membership business, independent of what any single platforms individual business objectives.
Public discourse revolved around the struggles of creators. Ran 6 Interviews, Topic monitoring, Discord surveys to validate our assumptions and search for more specific insights around the problems they faced.
Creators we spoke to saw their revenue slashed almost overnight. They relied almost exclusively on royalties revenue to keep their collections going.
There were two main schools of thought. Some creators wanted to undo this change by being vocal. Others were looking to take their business elsewhere, build their own marketplaces etc.
It turns out that the latter was cost prohibitive for most creators looking to take control of their revenue. While achievable fairly quickly; at the time the cost of build was high. This meant the large majority of creators were largely out of options.
Rather than compete with established secondary marketplaces, a race we couldn't win, we made Aspen an aggregator and turned our energy toward what no other platform was building, a tool that allowed creators to move their business "home" to a platform they had control over, without incurring the costs required for a custom build.
Beyond recovery, we gave creators a new revenue stream entirely: crypto-native subscriptions with gated access. The platform went from defensive to generative.
Always. Creators should be able to easily change how/when they use Aspen as their business organically grows and evolves.
This should feel as close as possible to building your own marketplace.
Aspen exists to help creators and dont want to charge upfront money when they are struggling. The revenue model needs to be thoughtful.
Gating by royalty payment status, automatic royalty detection with an integrated crypto payment flow, and an appeals process for disputed payments. The result: royalty payment rates on a key collection went from 10% to 90%.
Creators controlled exactly what inventory appeared on their storefront, from which platforms, and under what conditions. If they only wanted to spotlight an upcoming mint, they could hide secondary listings entirely. If they wanted to boycott a secondary marketplace they could hide those listings. If they wanted to eventually create a custom secondary they could connect that too. Secondary moved from the focus, to a part of the bigger picture.
Creators set a monthly price and restricted Discord, exclusive content, or community bots to paying subscribers only. New mints could be made available to subscribers first; a reliable way to reward the most engaged members.
Gating by royalty payment status, automatic royalty detection with an integrated crypto payment flow, and an appeals process for disputed payments. The result: royalty payment rates on a key collection went from 10% to 90%.
Using all our tools creators could redefine community membership based on what matters to them. They can create whitelists for first come first serve access to those who have paid royalties, subscribed, own a certain amount of their NFTs or any other requirements combination you can think of.
In future from the onset, I would avoid offering too many options to users to avoid analysis paralysis, even for technical audiences. Rather than making the users manually customise and configure their settings, use main use cases to map multiple smaller opinionated flows. This reduces the cognitive overhead, educates users on capabilities and increases usability significantly.
A creator membership platform built to recover royalty revenue and give NFT creators the tools to grow their business on their own terms. Senior Product Designer → CCO, one year. Led a team of 15 across design, content, and marketing over one year.
2022
SENIOR PRODUCT DESIGNER
VP OF DESIGN, CCO
PRODUCT STRATEGY
PRODUCT DESIGN
BRAND IDENTITY
STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
When NFT platforms began making royalty payments optional, creators lost a primary revenue stream overnight. It wasn't malicious; platforms were competing for buyers, and royalties created friction. But creators are the actual acquisition mechanism for new users in Web3. Someone hears about NFTs, investigates, finds a collection that appeals to them, and mints. That discovery loop depends entirely on creators being able to sustain their work. Undermining their revenue didn't just hurt creators; it threatened the pipeline that brings new users into the space.
To give NFT creators the tools to protect their income, reward their community, and grow a membership business, independent of what any single platforms individual business objectives.
Public discourse revolved around the struggles of creators. Ran 6 Interviews, Topic monitoring, Discord surveys to validate our assumptions and search for more specific insights around the problems they faced.
Creators we spoke to saw their revenue slashed almost overnight. They relied almost exclusively on royalties revenue to keep their collections going.
There were two main schools of thought. Some creators wanted to undo this change by being vocal. Others were looking to take their business elsewhere, build their own marketplaces etc.
It turns out that the latter was cost prohibitive for most creators looking to take control of their revenue. While achievable fairly quickly; at the time the cost of build was high. This meant the large majority of creators were largely out of options.
Rather than compete with established secondary marketplaces, a race we couldn't win, we made Aspen an aggregator and turned our energy toward what no other platform was building, a tool that allowed creators to move their business "home" to a platform they had control over, without incurring the costs required for a custom build.
Beyond recovery, we gave creators a new revenue stream entirely: crypto-native subscriptions with gated access. The platform went from defensive to generative.
Always. Creators should be able to easily change how/when they use Aspen as their business organically grows and evolves.
This should feel as close as possible to building your own marketplace.
Aspen exists to help creators and dont want to charge upfront money when they are struggling. The revenue model needs to be thoughtful.
Gating by royalty payment status, automatic royalty detection with an integrated crypto payment flow, and an appeals process for disputed payments. The result: royalty payment rates on a key collection went from 10% to 90%.
Creators controlled exactly what inventory appeared on their storefront, from which platforms, and under what conditions. If they only wanted to spotlight an upcoming mint, they could hide secondary listings entirely. If they wanted to boycott a secondary marketplace they could hide those listings. If they wanted to eventually create a custom secondary they could connect that too. Secondary moved from the focus, to a part of the bigger picture.
Creators set a monthly price and restricted Discord, exclusive content, or community bots to paying subscribers only. New mints could be made available to subscribers first; a reliable way to reward the most engaged members.
Gating by royalty payment status, automatic royalty detection with an integrated crypto payment flow, and an appeals process for disputed payments. The result: royalty payment rates on a key collection went from 10% to 90%.
Using all our tools creators could redefine community membership based on what matters to them. They can create whitelists for first come first serve access to those who have paid royalties, subscribed, own a certain amount of their NFTs or any other requirements combination you can think of.
In future from the onset, I would avoid offering too many options to users to avoid analysis paralysis, even for technical audiences. Rather than making the users manually customise and configure their settings, use main use cases to map multiple smaller opinionated flows. This reduces the cognitive overhead, educates users on capabilities and increases usability significantly.