Stagiro:
The freshest way to share and monetise content with you audience.
About client
Stagiro offers a way for content creators to monetise their content and find the right audience without any prejudice or limitation.
The founding team has approached us in their pre-product stage. They have identified an opportunity on a content monetisation market that has been recently shaken by numerous controversies surrounding the leading platform. Although being experienced with building tech companies themselves, Stagiro team has decided to focus on marketing & sales and invited us to help them build the platform from scratch to launch faster.
Objective
The team had provided their own initial research, outlining some of the core features they wanted to build. We were brought in early in the process to help prioritise the backlog, research and design the brand identity and develop a well designed content monetisation platform focused on discovery and positive relationships between creators and their audience.
To allow the creators to become a star of their own online stage.
Problems to solve
Adult friendly, but open to all
The goal was to build a NSFW friendly content platform that would not feel like another cookie cutter adult paywall provider. Stagiro wanted to provide world class tools to present and monetise content to all creators in one place, no matter if they create traditional art or produce nude content – or even better, both at the same time.
This create a challenge from the branding point of view, where we had to find the right balance between communicating that adult creators are indeed welcome and providing an aesthetically friendly experience like Instagram did for artists before.
Best in class monetisation options
Current options to monetise content are fragmented between different platforms where each offers different tools or optimises for different kind of content.
There is currently a huge gap in quality between non-adult and adult platforms – strictly non-adult platforms are well designed, offer wide variety of tools and offer positive brand experience, most adult focused platforms are either straight up porn focused or their experience and features are nowhere near what is expected from any content creator in 2020s.
Our challenge was to change this and provide enough flexible tools for different monetistion needs.
The process
We started with a few weeks long discovery process, focused on mapping the current market and mood & needs of the creators themselves. We engaged in various community groups for creators, interview users of different platforms and performed an extensive competitive analysis covering both the state of the product itself, but also feedback from it’s users.
These findings were used to prioritise the MVP and provide an outline for the brand strategy of the platform. We designed and developed the MVP in multiple iterations, to shorten the release cycle and have an opportunity to test & amend features before too much effort was burned.
We were lucky to have an invested client that worked with us closely during all stages of the process and understood the benefits of a lean iterative process.
Design System
The project was expected to scale from day 1, so we designed and documented a lean design system that was used by designers & developers on the team to mockup and build new features faster and in a consistent way. This shortened the review process and made documentation easier.
One of the biggest challenges was to create a flexible enough monetisation tools so that different types of creators can use Stagiro exclusively without having to use other solutions for their niche needs. We looked across the different industries and created a flexible system where users can post free or paid content in different ways, offer subscriptions or sell individual content with one-off purchases, accept donations and more.
Having different creators with different needs is not only about providing them with monetisation tools they need – the content also needs to look amazing at all times and be easily discoverable. The more ambitious long term goal of Stagiro is to allow the creators to use Stagiro not only as a paywall, but also way to share content and communicate with their free audience and grow it organically.
Stagiro is designed since day 1 as being a social platform that allows for easy content discovery. Extra effort was put into making sure that profiles & content on Stagiro looks better than on the other monetisation platforms.
Although Stagiro is not welcome in App Stores due to their NSFW friendly policy, we wanted to make sure the users get all the advantages of mobile app even in their browser. We created a progressive web app that users can easily pin into their homescreen and utilised typical mobile app patterns such as bottom navigation bar or smooth micro interactions.
Great front-end is just half of the success. We have helped develop tools for Stagiro to make sure that everything stays secure and compliant to regulations. We have implement automated ID verification process for the creators to stay AML/KYC compliant, every content is also instantly checked on the BE by an AI before it gets published to prevent a publication illegal or harmful content.
We also created tools for all parties to review & manage their transactions – subscription management for subscribers, payments log and easy payout for creators and extensive logs for Stagiro admins & accounting. We also made sure VAT & fees are handled effortlessly through the platform.
Stagiro has launched just recently, but we are already working on further iterations, optimising existing flows and creating some new exciting features to help creators get discovered.
