Taste the City

Advisor, Product Design & GTM • 2023-2026

Taste the City is a hospitality marketplace connecting restaurants, curators, and diners using SMS-guided food tours. The platform helps creators monetize restaurant recommendations, helps users a discover where to eat without decision fatigue, and offers restaurants exposure to new customers at no cost.I supported product design and GTM during a growth phase, with a focus on improving browsing and booking inside a technically constrained MVP.

Context

When I stepped in, the product was live in hundreds of restaurants in Canadian and showed clear demand. Traffic from social was strong, but conversion was lagging. The team was preparing to fundraise and needed to support better conversion without rebuilding the product.

problem

Users dropped off while browsing routes and during booking.The team got regular feedback that the UX felt unreliable. Visual hierarchy was inconsistent, imagery was deprioritized, and routes lacked context beyond the general location and number of stops. The core challenge was building trust and setting expectations.

APPROACH

We avoided a full rebuild and focused on changes that could unblock sales quickly.Scope was limited to route discovery and booking. The goal was to help users understand what a route offered, decide if it fit their needs, and complete a booking without unnecessary interruption.In parallel, we worked with engineering to remove backend blockers that forced authentication too early in the flow.

KEY DECISIONS

WORK & DESIGN SYSTEM

The redesigned flow moves users from browsing to booking by foregrounding food imagery, geographic context, and practical details like duration and distance.

The homepage now leads with routes, using cities as filters rather than the starting point. This lowers cognitive load, which matters when one of the main reasons to book is not having to decide where to eat.

DESIGN SYSTEM FOUNDATIONS

Route cards, route pages, search, and city context were standardized and reused across the experience. A small set of shared components replaced one-off UI decisions and gave developers a clear reference for future work.

CHALLENGES

The ability to do a full redesign was constrained by early decisions on backend architecture, specifically authentication and how SMS guidance was delivered.
Another challenge was balancing the surprise element of the tours with setting appropriate expectations. The founders want to preserve mystery, while users need enough context to feel comfortable booking.We aligned on showing representative examples of food, chef highlights, and clearer location cues without revealing any stops.

RESULTS

The redesign is currently in implementation.Early signals include clearer browsing behavior, fewer interruptions during booking, and increased confidence from founders and operators. Long-term success will be measured through conversion and repeat usage.

WHAT'S NEXT

Seam Social

Co-founder & Design Lead • 2021-2023

Seam Social was a customizable social platform and SDK that let users extend identity across games and online communities.I designed the core product and mini app SDK, enabling users to create personalized mini apps, apply themes, and embed their profiles outside the platform.

All users set a profile song during onboarding

One of many community-requested profile themes

CHALLENGE

Seam faced two cold-start problems: a standalone social platform without users, and an SDK without distribution to attract developers.Without users, developers had no reason to build. Without the interesting features developers created, users had little reason to stay.

APPROACH

To address the cold start on both the platform and the SDK, I focused on distribution. We built a lightweight integration that embedded Seam profiles and mini-apps directly into Pixels, seeding real usage and attracting developers through a single high-signal launch.

OPPORTUNITY

Pixels is a top blockchain MMORPG with over 250k DAU ( at the time) and an active social layer, but lacked flexible in-game identity features. This made it an ideal environment to introduce Seam, where profiles could be immediately visible, useful, and socially legible.

Outcomes

Seam had an immediate 10x increase in daily active users

Embedding Seam identity directly into Pixels was our strongest go-to-market outcome. The integration also served as a distribution channel for the SDK, leading 12 external developers to build custom features.

Reflection

This project reinforced that distribution-first design beats building standalone for niche products. Embedding Seam's identity into existing social environments through lightweight SDK integration validated demand and focused engineering effort on what actually mattered.

Doormat Wallet

Founding Product Designer • 2024-2025

Doormat was a self-custody multi party compute (MPC) crypto wallet, leveraging threshold signature signing and distributed key generation. It later became a trading terminal with transaction batching and automation tools for advanced users.I joined as the first product designer as the team prepared to launch the initial MVP. This case study focuses on the key product and design decisions that shaped the path towards product market fit rather than any single product design process or challenge.

MAY 2024

I designed the MVP for our self-custody MPC wallet available on desktop, mobile, Chrome and iOS

Objective
Let users access any key from any of their devices using just a master password and another device to grant permission. This is a unique offering because it allows users to access their assets without entering a seed phrase (or recovery phrase) in new devices.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

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

Objective
Create a differentiated trading advantage inside the wallet for advanced users.Solution
I led the design of the Keychains feature, a system that lets users generate and manage up to 100 wallets as a single execution unit and submit coordinated transactions across them in parallel.This enabled traders to distribute risk, automate strategies, and execute complex positions without external tooling.Challenges
Keychains introduced significant reliability risk: individual wallets frequently failed mid-transaction, breaking batch execution.I worked closely with engineering to map failure modes, model recovery paths, and design transparent error handling. We shipped a resilient fallback system with granular failure diagnostics and a “Retry Transaction” flow, allowing users to recover partial executions while infrastructure reliability improved.This approach reduced abandoned trades and preserved user trust during periods of network instability.Impact
Keychains repositioned Doormat from a secure wallet to trading execution infrastructure. It became the primary onboarding path for advanced traders and a core driver of power-user retention.

February 2025

I led a full product redesign from an MPC wallet into a trading platform modeled after the 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 supported 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.