My role
I led the design at Pond, a platform helping early-stage AI startups raise capital and grow, collaborated closely with the founder, CPO, and engineers.
This case study focuses on designing a 0→1 Markets experience that builds trust and drives action from investors, which in turn helps builders succeed.
Project Type
To C web app
0-1
MVP
Launched
Sector
AI
Web 3
Team
CEO, CPO, CTO
Engineering team
Design team
Why this feature?
To succeed, early-stage AI projects need more than just code. They require funding, visibility, and early community support.
I just want to build, but pushing for funding and finding my potential users have eaten all my time.
Builder, Lyla
The founding team at Pond identified this as a critical obstacle in the builder journey. Early-stage AI teams lacked access to funding, visibility, and tooling in one platform. This insight led to the opportunity to create a tokenized launchpad as a core part of the Pond ecosystem. The goal was to attract promising builders, help them secure funding, build with Pond’s AI tools, and ultimately launch and monetize their projects within the platform.
It was just an idea until our design team brought it to life. As the design lead, I led another product designer to turn this concept into a launched MVP, one that saw strong impact from day one.
Impact
Through a combination of strategic UX design and coordinated Pond team efforts, several high-potential AI projects successfully launched. The results were immediate:
So how did we get there?
Design goal & strategies
Through user surveys (15 active investors responded) and research into Web3 investor behavior, we identified some key barriers to early-stage funding:
To solve these, we focused the design strategy around:
Clarity
Investors needed to understand a project's value and details quickly and efficiently.
Credibility
Projects had to feel real, trustworthy, and human to build investor confidence.
Urgency
If a project looked fundable, investors needed a gentle push to act now, not later.
Additionally, one of our survey questions helped us pinpoint what matters most to potential investors when evaluating projects.
The survey results showed that users want to see the project summary, social signals, token stats, and team credibility surfaced clearly above the fold.
With these key insights in mind, we began designing the flow of the Pond Markets experience. I wanted to highlight two key design decisions here to demonstrate how we applied those insights in practice.
Key design 1
Effortless project discovery
Our first challenge:
How might we design project cards that help investors quickly evaluate and discover promising AI projects?
Based on our earlier survey results, we structured the project card layout around 6 key elements:
Project card structure
Key design 2
Creating trustworthy connections between investors and builders. Transparent, but not overwhelming.
In the onchain world, who is building a project matters as much as what is being built. Our research showed that investors evaluating live token projects want more than just product details. They want to know who’s behind it, whether it’s a solid project, and what’s happening.
But too much information can be overwhelming. So, we surfaced key social signals (social media links & wallet address) right below the project title.
This not only builds trust, but also boosts visibility for builders, perfectly aligning with Pond’s mission to help builders gain traction. For example, Blai gained over 800 followers within just 24 hours of launching on Pond.
We also decided to design the project detail page with two columns. This layout allows the token chart and investment-related cards to appear side by side for easier comparison. To keep the call-to-action visible at all times, the investment-related cards stick to the top of the page as users scroll.
On mobile, dense investment data didn’t work well in a single column. We solved this by splitting content into two main tabs:
one for project info, one for investment details.
The CTA stays sticked to the bottom, ensuring easy access at all times.
An Autonomous AI Agent for Creative and Logical Task Execution
$TRSA
0x4F9F...d1A825
Proposed
Seeding
Active
Video
Presentation
Project description
Milestones (2/4)
Discussion (25)
Activity
Project plan
Overview & vision
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Nullam urna tellus pellentesque leo. Lacinia facilisis tincidunt est aliquet tincidunt hendrerit nisi malesuada velit. Pulvinar donec lectus malesuada odio in bibendum. Fusce amet curabitur aliquam tincidunt blandit libero. Viverra volutpat id scelerisque quis ut elit tellus non. Fames cursus augue dolor nunc nisl vivamus penatibus. Semper est urna arcu nullam mi erat. Gravida id urna elementum vulputate mi ornare.
Business plan
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Final deliverables
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Nullam urna tellus pellentesque leo. Lacinia facilisis tincidunt est aliquet tincidunt hendrerit nisi malesuada velit. Pulvinar donec lectus malesuada odio in bibendum. Fusce amet curabitur aliquam tincidunt blandit libero. Viverra volutpat id scelerisque quis ut elit tellus non. Fames cursus augue dolor nunc nisl vivamus penatibus. Semper est urna arcu nullam mi erat. Gravida id urna elementum vulputate mi ornare.
Token allocation
Tranche name
% of total tokens
# tokens
Liquidity pool
40%
400m
Pre-sale
10%
100m
Team allocation
50%
500m
Milestones
35%
100m
Airdrop
10%
100m
Governance
5%
50m
Total
100%
1b
9:41
Trade
Information
Investment
Information
Investment
Invest
Current token price
$0.0047144
Token left
10%
Enter amount
1 USDC = 129195.3741 TRSA
Fee = 0.53
Trade
I agree to Investment terms
9djbp8...zbgcg
Split the mobile view into two major tabs
Investment CTA stick to bottom
Key design 3
Make Dutch auction simple
Our first challenge:
“I just can not decide!!!”
To increase urgency, the CPO proposed Dutch auction function, where token price drops over time while availability decreases.
At first, I had no idea what a Dutch auction was, and realized many of our users wouldn’t either. We invested time in designing a simple, readable chart to visualize:
How price changes over time
How token supply decreases
Our goal: Make the auction logic feel understandable, not intimidating.
Next step
Want to know more about actual investor behaviors to iterate
To keep improving the feature, I’d prioritize tracking key investor metrics to guide the next iterations:
1
Repeat investor rate
How many investors come back to fund multiple projects.
This tells us whether the experience builds enough trust to bring people back.
2
User feedback on trustworthiness
Explicitly ask founders and investors how trustworthy the platform feels.
Trust is central to early-stage investment platforms—this feedback will help strengthen that perception.
Beyond product design
Design marketing materials
As an agency, we design beyond just products. I also led marketing-related design efforts to support Pond’s events and social media promotions.
This included:
Landing page
Event posters
Promotional social media posts
Email templates
Demo video
