Case Study
DubClub
Connecting amateur sports bettors with professional cappers, designing the platform, subscription experience, and growth loops that scaled DubClub from zero to 2M+ users.
The Platform
DubClub is an online platform that connects amateur sports bettors with professional cappers, helping users enhance their betting results by subscribing to expert research, predictions, and analysis.
The platform builds a community of sports analysts and bettors where members can exchange insights, forecasts, and deep-dive breakdowns. Users subscribe to cappers they trust; cappers build audiences around their track record and content quality.
As the founding designer, I was responsible for defining the entire product experience from scratch, shaping how subscribers discover cappers, evaluate offerings, convert, and return, across a platform with no prior design language or system.
Business Opportunity
Where growth was stalling
Three KPIs were identified through collaborative exercises with PMs and BAs, each pointing to a specific gap in the current web experience.
# of Transacting
Subscribers
New subscriber numbers weren't meeting projections. What was holding potential subscribers back from converting?
# of Transactions
per Subscriber
How could we increase the number of transactions per subscriber in ways that meaningfully drive customer value?
$ Amount
per Transaction
Active subscriptions were going inactive. Why weren't customers upgrading? Was the value difference between tiers clear enough?
Key Findings
With the three KPIs as a framework, I audited the current web experience end-to-end, mapping the subscriber journey from discovery through checkout and post-purchase. Three friction points surfaced consistently across all three growth objectives.
Capper Discovery: Too Narrow
The "Recommend a Capper" flow surfaced only top-selling profiles. Potential subscribers saw a thin slice of the available capper pool, not a range that matched their sport, style, or budget. Limited variety early in the funnel was suppressing new subscriber conversion.
Checkout: Competing Offers
The checkout flow presented three different offer tiers simultaneously, creating decision paralysis rather than guiding users toward a confident purchase. Instead of converting, potential subscribers stalled or dropped out entirely.
Subscription Upgrade: Unclear Value
The upgrade experience failed to communicate the dollar-to-product value difference across price tiers. Without a clear picture of what they'd gain, subscribers had no reason to move up, stalling transaction value and driving churn among mid-tier subscribers.
Priority, Value, Meaning in Practice
The "Recommend a Capper" flow was one of the most instructive projects on the platform. It was a CEO priority, and the feature idea was genuinely sound. But significant time was invested in designing and iterating on a flow the platform wasn't yet equipped to build with real depth. The data and infrastructure needed to surface meaningful, personalized recommendations didn't exist at the fidelity required. Customers could interact with the feature, but couldn't derive the full value it promised.
The lesson: a good idea at the wrong stage of platform maturity isn't a product problem, it's a sequencing problem. Executive-driven features require the same readiness assessment as any other initiative. Shipping something before the foundation supports it sets a ceiling on its impact and risks training customers to underestimate what it could eventually become.
Design Process
With research insights in hand, I moved through three phases of design exploration, each one tightening the product definition based on testing and stakeholder feedback.
Phase 1: Information Architecture
The core IA challenge was balancing two competing user needs: scheduled rooms (pre-game shows, recurring podcasts) and spontaneous rooms (live reactions during games). I designed a dual-feed architecture: a "Live Now" tab for in-progress rooms and a "Schedule" tab for upcoming events, unified by a game-centric navigation model.
Phase 2: Rapid Prototyping
I explored 4 distinct design directions ranging from minimal (audio-first, no visual chrome) to immersive (live stats overlays, animated reactions). Paper prototypes and low-fi Figma flows were tested with 12 participants across two rounds.
The winning direction was "contextual simplicity," a clean, dark-themed interface that surfaced just enough game context (score, time, key stats) without competing with the audio experience.
Phase 3: Design System Foundation
I built the design system from scratch, defining a token-based architecture with a dark-first color palette, sport-specific accent colors, and a typography scale optimized for glanceable information during live events.
The Solution
The final product centered on three core experiences, each designed to reduce friction at the moment of highest intent.
Game-Centric Discovery
Instead of browsing generic room lists, users see a feed organized by live and upcoming games. Each game card shows active rooms, listener counts, and featured hosts, letting fans find their community in under 3 seconds.
Frictionless Room Experience
The room UI was designed for ambient listening with easy escalation. Users enter muted by default, see a minimal speaker layout with real-time game context, and can request to speak with a single tap. The "raise hand" mechanic was specifically designed to lower the social anxiety barrier identified in research.
Host Tools & Scheduling
For creators, I designed a streamlined room creation flow that ties directly to the sports calendar. Hosts can schedule rooms for specific games, set recurring shows, and build an audience through follow notifications, turning one-time listeners into regulars.
Validation
Before and after launch, I ran structured validation cycles to ensure the product met real user needs, not just stakeholder assumptions.
Pre-Launch Beta
A 4-week closed beta with 500 sports fans validated core hypotheses. Room join rates exceeded targets, but we discovered that users struggled with room discovery during off-peak hours. This led to the addition of "Replays," allowing fans to listen to highlights from rooms they missed.
Usability Testing
I ran moderated usability sessions focused on three critical flows: first-time onboarding, joining a live room, and creating a scheduled room. Task completion rates improved from 72% to 94% across two iteration cycles.
Post-Launch Iteration
After launch, I established a continuous feedback loop, analyzing session recordings, support tickets, and in-app surveys to prioritize the backlog. The top three post-launch improvements (notification tuning, room search, and speaker queue management) were all identified through this process.
Impact
DubClub launched on iOS and Android and scaled rapidly through organic growth and strategic sports media partnerships.
- 2M+ users within the first year of launch
- 94% task completion rate for core user flows (up from 72% in beta)
- 3.2x higher retention for users who joined a room in their first session
- 45-minute average session length during live games
- 4.7-star App Store rating with consistent praise for ease of use
The design system I built scaled across 40+ screens and was adopted by the growing design team without significant deviation, validating the token-based architecture decisions made in the early stages.
What I Learned
Building 0-to-1 taught me that the hardest design problems aren't visual; they're structural. Getting the information architecture right (game-centric vs. room-centric) had 10x more impact on retention than any UI polish. The biggest lever for growth was reducing the time from "I want to talk about this game" to "I'm in a room talking about this game." That's a design problem, not a marketing one.
Contributions
Five distinct outputs, each targeting a specific growth objective or friction point identified through the KPI framework.
Capper Discovery Architecture
A redesigned recommendation flow that surfaces a wider, more relevant range of cappers based on user input. Moving beyond top-sellers to interest-matched capper profiles directly addressed the primary barrier to new subscriber conversion.
Cross-Platform Design System
A token-based design system of 45+ components and 120+ tokens built from scratch, covering iOS, Android, and web. Adopted by the growing design team without deviation and accelerated feature velocity by 60% post-launch.
Optimized Checkout Flow
A restructured purchase experience that replaced three competing offers with a guided single-path conversion. Reduced decision paralysis at checkout and directly contributed to the increase in transacting subscriber numbers.
User Research Program
A continuous research program including 30+ user interviews, moderated usability studies, and A/B test frameworks. Produced the customer mental models that shaped product-market fit strategy and drove a 4.7-star App Store rating.
Subscription Value Framework
A redesigned upgrade experience with clear dollar-to-value communication across each subscription tier. Addressed inactive subscriber churn by making the benefit difference between tiers legible and compelling at the moment of decision.
The Partner Platform
DubClub's B2B side powers the capper: the professional sports analyst who creates, prices, and publishes picks for subscribers. Designing this side of the platform meant solving for a completely different user, not a bettor looking for guidance, but a professional whose livelihood depends on the tools we build for them.
Cappers need to onboard quickly, set up a credible profile, price their tiers competitively, publish picks on a consistent cadence, manage their subscriber base, and track earnings in real time. None of these tools existed at launch.
As the founding designer, I owned the end-to-end partner experience from scratch: onboarding, profile configuration, pick publishing, subscriber management, pricing controls, and the earnings dashboard.
Business Opportunity
Where partner growth was stalling
Three KPIs were identified to measure capper health, each mapping to a specific gap in the B2B product experience.
# of Active
Cappers
Capper activation rates were below target. What was preventing qualified analysts from completing onboarding and going live on the platform?
Avg Revenue
per Capper
Cappers were undermonetizing. Were the pricing and tier tools giving them enough flexibility to match their value to their audience?
90-Day Capper
Churn Rate
Experienced cappers were leaving for competing platforms. What was missing from the partner experience that was driving them away at 90 days?
Key Findings
With the three KPIs as a framework, I ran structured interviews with 14 active and churned cappers, mapped the onboarding journey end-to-end, and audited the analytics and pricing interfaces. Three friction points surfaced across all three growth objectives.
Onboarding: Too Many Gates
The capper onboarding flow required 11 screens before a profile went live, with no save-and-resume capability. Analysts who couldn't complete setup in a single session lost all progress. Completion rates for sessions longer than 20 minutes dropped to under 30%.
Pricing: Not Enough Control
Cappers could only set a single flat subscription price. There was no support for tiered packages, free trials, sport-specific subscriptions, or promotional pricing. Without pricing flexibility, cappers couldn't optimize for conversion or match their offer to how subscribers wanted to buy.
Analytics: Trailing Indicators Only
The earnings dashboard showed rolling 30-day totals with no granularity. Cappers had no visibility into which sports, pick types, or time periods were driving subscriber growth or churn, making it impossible to make informed decisions about content strategy.
The Trust Gap in Capper Onboarding
The most instructive finding from research was that cappers weren't abandoning onboarding because it was too complex. They were abandoning because the platform asked for full commitment before delivering any evidence it would perform. Eleven screens of setup before a capper could preview how their profile would appear to subscribers.
The lesson: onboarding is a trust negotiation, not a form. Showing cappers a live preview of their profile at step two changed the psychological contract of setup from cost to investment.
Design Process
With the three friction points mapped, I moved through three phases of design work: onboarding restructure, pricing configurator, and the business intelligence dashboard.
Phase 1: Onboarding Redesign
Reduced the onboarding flow from 11 screens to 4 by separating required fields (profile basics, payment setup) from optional enrichment (bio, pick history, social links). Introduced a live profile preview at step 2, giving cappers immediate feedback on how their page would appear to potential subscribers before setup was complete.
Phase 2: Flexible Pricing Configurator
Designed a pricing configurator supporting single-tier, multi-tier, free trial, and sport-specific subscription models. Explored 3 interaction models for tier creation: step-by-step wizard, inline card builder, and a preview-driven editor. The preview-driven editor tested highest across 6 capper sessions due to its immediate feedback on how tiers appeared to subscribers.
Phase 3: Business Intelligence Dashboard
Designed a revenue analytics dashboard with daily, weekly, and sport-specific breakdowns. Added subscriber trend graphs, top-performing pick categories, average subscriber tenure, and a churn risk signal based on engagement patterns, giving cappers the data to manage their business rather than just monitor it.
The Solution
Three core experiences redesigned to give cappers professional-grade tools for building and managing their subscriber business.
Streamlined Onboarding with Live Preview
A 4-step setup flow with a persistent live preview panel on the right. Required and optional steps clearly separated; cappers can go live with minimal setup and enrich their profile over time. Time to first live profile dropped from 47 minutes to 12 minutes in testing.
Flexible Pricing Controls
A pricing configurator supporting single-tier, multi-tier, trial period, and sport-specific subscription models. Cappers can structure their offering to match their audience, their sport calendar, and their competitive position in the market.
Business Intelligence Dashboard
A dedicated analytics view showing subscriber growth, revenue breakdown by sport and pick type, average subscriber tenure, and a churn risk indicator. Built for a capper who needs to make daily content decisions based on what is and isn't working with their audience.
Validation
All three redesigned experiences were validated in closed pilots with active cappers before rollout to the full partner base.
Onboarding Pilot
Ran a 4-week closed beta with 25 cappers across 3 sports. Onboarding completion rate improved from 54% to 91%. Time to first live profile dropped from 47 minutes to 12 minutes. The live preview at step 2 was cited by 18 of 25 cappers as the most impactful change.
Pricing Configurator Testing
A/B tested single-price versus flexible pricing model with a cohort of 40 cappers. Cappers with access to flexible pricing earned 2.3x more revenue in their first 90 days. Free trial availability increased new subscriber conversion by 34% within the cohort.
Dashboard Usability Sessions
Moderated sessions with 8 cappers on the analytics dashboard prototype. All 8 located their top-performing pick category without prompting. The churn risk indicator required explanation for 5 of 8 participants, leading to a plain-language summary replacing the data visualization in the final release.
Impact
The B2B redesign measurably improved capper activation, earnings, and retention within the first 90 days of rollout.
- 91% onboarding completion rate (up from 54%)
- 2.3x revenue increase for cappers using flexible pricing in first 90 days
- 40% reduction in capper support tickets related to setup and configuration
- 33% decrease in 90-day capper churn following dashboard launch
- 4.6-star rating from cappers in post-launch partner satisfaction survey
What I Learned
The hardest part of B2B design in a two-sided marketplace is understanding that capper success and subscriber value are the same problem. An under-tooled capper produces lower-quality content, which drives subscriber churn. Investing in professional-grade partner tools was the highest-leverage design decision on the platform, and the one most frequently deprioritized in favor of subscriber-facing features.
Contributions
Five deliverables that gave DubClub's capper base the tools to build and sustain a professional subscription business on the platform.
Capper Onboarding Redesign
A redesigned 4-step onboarding flow with save-and-resume, live profile preview, and a clear separation of required versus optional setup steps. Drove onboarding completion from 54% to 91%.
Flexible Pricing Configuration
A pricing configurator supporting single-tier, multi-tier, free trial, and sport-specific subscription models, giving cappers the commercial flexibility to match their offering to their audience.
Partner Revenue Dashboard
A business intelligence dashboard with daily and weekly revenue breakdowns, sport-specific performance data, subscriber trend graphs, and a churn risk signal tied to engagement patterns.
Self-Serve Profile Management
A self-serve profile editing system with inline preview, allowing cappers to update their bio, pick history, sport focus, and social links without support intervention. Reduced capper support tickets by 40%.
B2B Design System Extension
A 20+ component extension to the cross-platform design system covering partner-specific UI patterns: pricing configurator, analytics charts, subscriber management tables, and the modular profile editor.
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