Taste the City

Advisor, Product Design & GTM • 2023-2026

Taste the City is a hospitality marketplace connecting restaurants, curators, and tasters through SMS-guided food tours. The platform helps creators monetize recommendations, gives users a low-friction way to discover where to eat without decision fatigue, and offers restaurants exposure to new customers at no upfront cost.I originally joined as an advisor and later have supported the team with product design. We have focused on unblocking growth by improving the browsing and booking experience and helping the founders operate more effectively inside a technically constrained MVP.

Context

When I stepped in, the product was live across multiple Canadian cities with over 200 active restaurants. The product MVP was built quickly using Next.js and Rails, and kept seperate from their marketing website. Users were required to create an account during checkout, often losing their progress. The team was preparing for a larger funding round, and demand was clearly present but conversion was lagging.

problem

Users were consistently dropping off while browsing routes and during booking. Routes were difficult to evaluate, especially for non-locals, and the purchase flow forced users into authentication at the worst possible moment.Data and qualitative signals pointed to UX, not demand, as the limiting factor. Traffic spikes from social did not translate into bookings, despite strong browsing activity. Users explicitly reported frustration and confusion at checkout.The UX also felt unreliable. Visual hierarchy was inconsistent, imagery was deprioritized, and routes lacked enough context to help users feel oriented. The core challenge was building trust and setting expectations.

How do you help someone feel comfortable paying upfront for a surprise dining experience?

APPROACH

The goal was to avoid a full rebuild of the MVP and unblock sales as quickly as possible. So I focused on clarity, systemization, and preserving what already worked. We limited scope to browsing and the booking-to-checkout experience.“Good enough” meant users could understand what a route offered, decide if it fit their needs, and complete a booking without being forced to start over.

PROCESS & TRADEOFFS

We standardized the experience around speed and comparability, accepting the MVPs technical constraints to stay focused on the fastest path to growth.

WORK & DESIGN SYSTEM

The redesigned flow moves users from browse to booking by foregrounding food imagery, geographic context, and convenience cues that help users decide quickly.

We shifted from a city-first structure to a route-first one. Instead of forcing users to choose a city and interpret neighborhoods or stop counts, the homepage now highlights compelling routes first, with cities acting as a filter rather than the entry point.

The highest-impact change was the booking flow. Time selection, guest details, and checkout were streamlined to preserve momentum and avoid forced authentication resets.

DESIGN SYSTEM FOUNDATIONS

Route cards, route pages, search, and city context were standardized and reused across the experience. Consistent hierarchy, spacing, and primary actions made the interface faster to scan and easier to reason about.

A shared Figma component system replaced one-off UI decisions, giving developers a clear reference and enabling faster, more consistent iteration going forward.

CHALLENGES

This work was complex despite its surface simplicity. Original architectural decisions lacked documentation, and frontend behavior was tightly coupled to a manually operated backend.Authentication was the largest technical constraint. Another major challenge was stakeholder alignment: founders wanted to preserve the surprise element, while users needed more reassurance. We aligned on showing representative examples and clearer location context without fully revealing every stop.

RESULTS

The redesign is currently in implementation, with early signals pointing to reduced browsing confusion, a clearer booking path, and higher internal confidence from the founders and operators. Long-term success will be measured by whether these improvements translate into sustained conversion and repeat usage.

WHAT'S NEXT

Next work focuses on turning these improvements into durable systems that support growth and habit formation.

Seam Social

Co-founder & Design Lead • 2021-2023

Seam was a social platform and SDK that let users build customizable social profiles with composable "blocks" (mini apps). The unique value existed in being deeply customizable and allowing users to own, remix, and sell their customizations as well as take their profile into other surfaces like games.

How much do users value customization, ownership and extensibility for their social profile pages?

PROBLEM

Incumbent social platforms limit how people can express themselves and own all of users content and creativity by default.

Challenge

Maximum customization required extensive block library, developer SDK, and user education. But this created a cold-start problem: users won't customize empty profiles, developers won't build blocks without users, and we couldn't build everything ourselves.We needed a wedge that proved value before the full platform existed.

Approach

Rather than build features hoping users would come, I advocated for distribution-first design through partnerships. When I spoke with the team at Pixels (a 250K+ player MMORPG) and realized they needed social context for players, I proposed lightweight profile integration: pre-built profiles using onchain data, no customization required initially. Engineering wanted full feature parity. I pushed for read-only profiles to ship in two weeks vs. months for full SDK integration. This validated demand before building complexity.

Outcome

Pixels integration reached over 200K players, with ~20% creating Seam profiles in six weeks. It was our most successful GTM strategy to date. Promoting the mini app SDK afterward led to 15 new developers building and publishing blocks. This proved that embedding identity in existing online social environments can outperform standalone social apps. Our iMessage mini app experiment (FitCheck) hit #7 App Store and helped secure a $2M seed round.

Doormat Wallet

Founding Product Designer • 2024-2025

I joined Doormat as Founding Product Designer during the MVP phase, before the first dozen alpha users. This case study focuses on the key architectural and product decisions that shaped adoption rather than solving a single product design challenge.

MAY 2024

Launched the MVP, a multi-device MPC wallet available from day one across desktop, mobile, Chrome and iOS

Objective
Let users access their self-custody wallets from any device using just a password.Solution
We built a desktop-first, mobile-friendly web app alongside an iOS app and Chrome extension. Using custom-built MPC key management (not Turnkey or Privy) users could access any EVM or Solana key from any device without seed phrases or custody tradeoffs.Impact
This validated Doormat’s technical foundation and differentiated it from traditional wallets, but also revealed that security primitives alone were not enough to drive repeat usage.

OCTOBER 2024

Introduced key orchestration - the Keychains feature - to give power users an execution advantage

Objective
Provide a trading advantage within the wallet that users could not get elsewhere.Solution
I led the design of Keychains, allowing users to generate and manage up to 100 wallets as a single unit and execute transactions across all of them simultaneously.Impact
Keychains shifted Doormat from being a secure multi-device wallet to execution infrastructure. This feature quickly became the primary onboarding route for advanced traders.

February 2025

I redesigned the product from a key and device focused wallet UI into a crypto Bloomberg Terminal

Objective
Support faster and more efficient trading workflows without users needing to rely on external tools or navigate outside of the product.Solution
I designed a unified, Bloomberg-style terminal that directly integrated Pump.fun, news, price tickers, live token charts, and a command line interface helping users minimize data fragmentation and execute faster.Impact
The Pump.fun integration became the primary entry point for over 60% of users, lifting 30-day retention to ~50%.

MAY 2025

We enabled automations for trade execution during peak market volatility so users could get some sleep

Terminal-native automation replacing manual scripts, reducing technical barriers without sacrificing control

Objective
Allow users to trade effectively even when offline during fast-moving markets.Solution
We built terminal-native automation rules, ranging from basic protections like stop losses to trading-specific logic such as round-trip protection, replacing brittle custom scripts without hiding complexity.Impact
Automations improved retention among power users and reduced reliance on external tooling, contributing to a ~50% lift in 30-day retention post-launch.

Outcome

Doormat evolved from an MPC wallet into a full trading terminal supporting Solana and EVM chains, Pump.fun integration, automated trading, and Keychains. The product scaled to 616 alpha users, 8,000+ wallets, $1.9M peak AUM, and $900K in trading volume, validating that power users will adopt complex tools when they meaningfully improve speed, control, and execution quality.