Working across product, growth, and Webflow to help freelancers showcase their work and collaborate with clients

The job description

The team at Advisable needed someone to help them with the following initiatives:

• Help to launch a project successfully on Product Hunt.
• Design and create a repeatable templates for freelancers’ case studies.
• A platform that could showcase the best freelancers, their case studies, and other articles about marketing.
• Figuring a way to suggest marketing specialist to clients based on their constraints.
• Other ideas that would improve collaborations between freelancers and specialists.

Given the chance to start a trial, I was immediately hooked. Their prospectives felt huge and I wanted to be part of an ambitious start-up team.

Work across different areas

Through all the projects at Advisable, I was happy to use my interests in design, product, growth, and Webflow. They needed someone that could take an idea and start ideating on it, suggesting design and prototypes, and later handing them off to the developers or building in Webflow or Unbounce.

Growth

Unsure if Growth Designer is the best title, but it resembles the work I did at Advisable.

With the growth team I worked on designing ads, micropages, building Advisable Insights (our blog), prototyping onboarding flows, and later becoming responsible for designing and building the entire website.

I like balancing the need for growth at a young start-up with the empathy and product thinking needed to create a beautiful user experience.

At Advisable I iterated a lot on the website to product flow. Given my entire time there, I was completely focused to scale the business while keeping a user-centric view.

Product

Here, I had great help from Thomas Cullen and Yurko Truskiy who both had backgrounds in design and were very capable in Figma, but their main focus was on building the platform.

All the features were a collaboration between (at least) the three of us designing and prototyping.

We worked together on messaging, dashboards, profiles, invoices, and case studies. A closer look at these projects here.

A way to receive useful feedback

It’s ideal to receive feedback for a group of existing or potential users of your platform. But this is rarely a constant at a start-up.

To make sure that we get the best possible feedback from the entire team, we’ve set up a new way.

• After we had explored multiple designs, we would choose the ones that made most sense. Let’s call these variants.
• For each variant we created a prototype flow that would showcase how people could use it inside the platform.
• Each flow had a different sharable link.
• We’d create a Loom explaining the thinking process that went into each variant, adding their possible benefits and drawbacks.
• We’d share this on Slack defining which areas they should focus on and exactly what kind of feedback we were looking for in each variant.

Without these constrains, the task of sending feedback to N number of flows seems larger and they have no idea where to focus.

We started getting more detailed feedback, people being more involved, and having longer debates about each proposed variant.

Go deeper into these subjects

I wrote two other articles in which I detail my experience at Advisable and what lesson I had been left with.

The first one talks about myths I believed before joining the company. It’s more of a personal one, detailing my struggles and insecurities as I worked at this start-up.

The second one goes deep into the projects and my work at Advisable.

Peter, the former CEO of Advisable, detailed the failures, lessons, and why Advisble shut down in this article.