My work at Advisable

At Advisable, I became the “design & prototype” guy. They wanted a “growth engineer” at first, but my skills in design and no-code fit the description. My job was to take growth ideas and make them tangible.

The pace was fast, feedback was constant, there were new lessons every day.

With time, my responsibilities and autonomy grew. Projects got more complex and my process expanded from only design & prototype to planning, doing research, designing, prototyping, building, and optimizing.

The people at Advisable and their care defined a big part of my personal growth, as I wrote in the first article. The other part of it was shaped by the projects I worked on.

Creating a template for case studies

Before I joined, Advisable had dedicated members to match marketing specialists with clients. But the founders wanted something more scalable and open. Instead of us matching the two sides, the product would become a streamlined way for clients to contact specialists. That’s why we were pivoting toward case studies.

We were betting on the fact that unlike designers and programmers (who use platforms like Dribbble, Behance, Github to showcase their projects), marketers rarely display their work because they have no easy way of doing it. Because of this, they lose out on amazing opportunities.

Thus, our goal became to educate them about case studies, make it simple to build them, and let them use this content to source clients.

Note that we never intended to create shallow relationships between specialists and clients. The key word for us was collaboration, which implied that both sides are equal.

My task was to understand what makes a case study great and then create a template that all freelancers will use. In product design, it’s common to develop a case study about a project. It’s easier to display your pixel-perfect screens than write about the entire process.

So after days of research, we identified the marks of a great case study:

It needed a catchy title that points out the skills and an important result achieved followed by a short description of the freelancer. Bite-sized results with specific metrics help so people won’t bounce immediately. They also want to know information on the company, its size, industry, and target (B2B/B2C). These allow them to quickly understand if the freelancer has experience in their field or if they can replicate the results.

The large content section is split into three parts. One represents the overview of the collaboration between the specialist and clients. The largest section details the process including the steps taken. In the final part of the case study, describe the results achieved based on the process and states the lessons of the collaboration.

What I learned:

• Catchy titles help to open your case study. But readers will leave the second the content doesn’t meet their expectations.
• Easy to understand info about the company and industry is a key to a lot of clients. They especially want to know two things: does the freelancer have experience in our market? Are their skills applicable in our market?
• It’s very hard to have good page retention if the content is not excellent and there are no assets. A huge wall of text can be intimidating for anybody.
• Case studies are amazing to find a good candidate, but regular recruiters don’t have the time to read many long-form articles.
• It significantly helped if the results were measurable (e.g. 4x conversions in 6 months).

Advisable Insights

Educating through content is one of the best ways to get quality leads. I dreamed of Advisable becoming a platform for the best case studies, articles on freelancing, podcast episodes, etc.

We named the blog Advisable Insights as we wanted to display to the world the best learnings from experienced marketing freelancers.

For me, it could’ve been one of the best channels for people to find out about Advisable and become active users. The difficult thing is to create content that people want to read week after week. And then have the time for it to compound.

We went through some 10s of iterations in Figma, but quickly found one that could be scalable and improved with time.

As I was building the platform in Webflow, I collaborated with a freelancer on Upwork to grab data from Airtable and feed it into Webflow’s CMS. It had to go through Zapier and that needed custom code for all the edge cases possible.

As more and more people created their case studies, we rewarded particularly great content with features on our blog and social media.

Updating the website with the latest winner or new case studies took minutes. It became easy to scale the content on the platform. With two clicks in Airtable, we had new content in Webflow, I just had to make sure that nothing failed on the way.

What I learned:

• The problem was somewhere deeper. And no amount of marketing and content would turn this around.
• The case studies were not enough. We needed more diversity in terms of content, we needed lots of new freelancers with great case studies. And that didn’t happen, so the quality slowly dropped.
• If you develop a blog or similar platform, make sure you have the time, budget, and content needed to see it gain momentum over a longer period of time.
• Webflow is great for the use cases above. It allows for a lot of experimentation, quick testing, and automation. You can also collaborate with writers, editors, or designers and let them do their work independently.

Onboarding flow for freelancers

This was one of the projects I had the most fun with.

We wanted each freelancer to have a case study ready as soon as they registered to our platform. It was a big ask, and maybe too big.

Before working on this flow, we had a team of 8 contractors that would interview new freelancers. They took notes, created a case study draft, had the freelancer review it, edit it again, and publish it. Some specialists loved the idea, but our CEO wanted something more scalable, cheaper, and faster.

We thought that VideoAsk would be personal, interactive, and clear enough to use in our onboarding flow. I started creating the flow, thinking of ways I could guide people to convey the best possible answers for each section in their case study.

To alleviate potential insecurities, we clarified that the videos were private, users had full editorial ownership over their content, and we would guide them along the way. We also hired a professional actress for the video guides as none of us looked natural enough on camera.

To not have to rely on editors, in its characteristic way, our CEO worked on training and AI with our pre-existing content. We thought this would help format users’ answers into polished case study drafts.

It didn’t go quite that well. So…

What we learned:

• People either loved or hated the process. They either praised us for an innovative way of interviewing them or critiqued us for wasting their time.
• A good part of them expected a perfect case study. We didn't make it clear enough that they'd have to edit it afterward.
• The AI often didn’t improve the content. When the transcription tool couldn't get the exact words, the AI added fluff or gibberish. This annoyed people.
• It took too long. Freelancers don’t want to invest that much time upfront without seeing the platform first. I believe the human aspect of the previous process (with interviews) made Advisable look more high-end and reliable.
• Few people can hit “record” and clearly communicate their ideas. Most of us need to write it down first and that made the onboarding process even longer.

There are two ways you could improve a similar process. One, by creating a different, simpler onboarding flow and keeping this process as one way to create case studies. That will most likely help with conversion as people can quickly get into the platform and peek around with ease. Then you could nudge them to create and add their case studies.

Two, by being completely open about the entire process and length. Those who would be more interested in an innovative and interactive way of creating a case study would’ve tried it. The others would’ve had a more familiar flow.

Based on these insights, I designed a new flow for creating a case study. It was faster, better designed, and without VideoAsk, but we didn’t get the chance to test it.

Completely redesigning and rebuilding the website

By the time I had a stable role at Advisable, the team contracted a freelancer to redesign the current website. It would’ve marked a new starting point for the company. A moment where we relaunch and doubled down on nurturing collaborations between freelancers and clients through case studies.

The freelancer introduced new branding elements that made us look more vibrant, young, but also professional and trustworthy. Through his designs, I elevated my skills by dissecting his effects, I gained a new branding direction for my micropages, product features, and marketing assets.

It gave the team hope that we’ll pivot with great success.

And that didn’t happen.

The direction was great, but the design and website could have done better.

Why?

• It took ages. Over 6 months is way too long for 2 landings.
• The freelancer didn’t design the website with real content so that postponed it even further.
• The design was beautiful, but not practical. It didn’t tell the story the right way and it was hard to implement.
• The live website sucked. Performance was in the 20s, the same for other relevant metrics.
• It had weird layouts on standard breakpoints and terrible performance on mobile.
• The scalability of the website wasn’t taken into consideration.
• The Webflow environment was a mess, there was no onboarding into the new website, and the developer was the only person who could understand what he did there. Plus, he became unavailable after this.

We still launched the new face of Advisable, but we didn't feel great about it. The enthusiasm faded away.

Starting in 2022, we bit the bullet and decided to create a new one.

It didn’t take us long to find a direction and design that we liked. We narrowed our focus on attracting and converting clients. Freelancers on Advisable had tons of skills and experience, they needed work from us.

In the span of 3 months, I created 3-4 different landing pages only for clients. We couldn’t settle on the positioning or copy, so we kept trying and trying.

Overall, it took more than a year to have a (more) stable version of the website. Along the way, I both assisted the first designer and was responsible for designing and building the last versions.

I rebuilt Advisable’s website in Framer. You can find it at this link, but it only looks well on a desktop. Because it was a fast build, this version of Advisable doesn’t have all the interactions, details, and other functionalities. You can still go through all pages and take a look at our work.

Miscellaneous

The project detailed above were essential for my growth at Advisable, but there were always parallel projects running in the background.

Freelancers’ dashboard

Oftentimes, the difference between freelancers and clients was marginal. Many freelancers were running their own businesses, turning to Advisable in the search for another specialist. That made us create a space where freelancers could start collaborating with each other.

Through Advisable Guild, freelancers had access to virtual meet-ups, round tables, and deep dives into marketing-related topics. If they couldn’t find work, at least Advisable should be a place to learn something from.

On paper, it sounded great.

But the initiative, came at a point when we ditched our efforts to attract more freelancers or keep them engaged. Advisable Guild was dissolved to focus on some more pressing ideas and most of our efforts went into converting clients. Pretty soon the place became stale. There were no new collaboration requests, updates, or new events. Not a lot of reasons for freelancers to engage.

Freelancers’ profiles

With time, profiles could’ve helped freelancers and conversions way more.

I love the idea of people collaborating through case studies. It’s an amazing way for clients to understand more about the process and approach of a specialist.

But a profile could be the best all-around description of a freelancer. It should help them showcase their personality, experience, projects, interests, and so on. It's what attracts a client before they decide to read a long-form article.

People don’t have the time to read an entire case study right from the beginning. They might read one because the title seems interesting, or the content is good, but they rarely engage.

The more natural process is to skim profiles, see what people you like, create a shortlist, and at a later point come back and take a closer look at each specialist. At that moment, people are more prone to read deeper and connect with a freelancer.

Testing prototypes with potential users

I always tried pushing forward the idea of testing new initiatives with existing and potential users. Maybe it’s just a designer’s stereotype to request research time and user testing sprints.

When we started our first user testing batch, I was truly happy.

I knew that for some it would be eye-opening, we would get immense insights into how people viewed our next features or existing products.

We were planning a large marketing campaign and the first user testing experiment helped us realize it wouldn’t benefit the company. People didn’t make the connection with Advisable, it wasn’t clear enough who it was for, and if they wouldn’t act based on it. We tested with people similar to the ones we tried to attract so it was clear that the effort of making this work was larger than the reward.

Our second user testing batch saved us from building a really confusing onboarding flow for clients. From our perspective, it was all clear and it should’ve gone smoothly.

But from the first interview, problems started to arise. Copy and design on the landing set up the wrong expectations. UI elements made the flow convoluted. Our depiction of case studies disoriented them. Things we thought were natural and clear confused them.

We needed to simplify the flow and improve the landing.

We had to clarify two things: what are case studies and how do freelancers and clients collaborate? It wasn’t easy. Case studies as a form to meet a marketing specialist and start a collaboration were confusing.

We never brought the clarity needed to all visitors. Some got it and loved it, some ditched it right away because they couldn’t get the concept.

After these testing sprints, people felt inspired. We were improving our product through detailed feedback, not based on hunches. It seemed like we had a direction, like things were starting to move, like we were putting the pieces together.

In the middle of another testing period, all efforts stopped. Advisable was soon to be shut down. We knew for a while that the situation was not great, but it was still a surprise.

As I tried to transition to design in 2020, I doubted this decision a lot. It was a completely unknown field in which I had zero experience. My time and work at Advisable gave me the confidence that I can help companies through design and my thinking.

I got to work on various projects and build a large skillset. Not a profound one in which I specialized, but one that now allows me to choose what my next thing will be.

Want to read more on Advisable? Peter, the former CEO of Advisable, detailed the failures, lessons, and why Advisble shut down in this article.