Klip

The Situation

Klip is a social app that sparks communities around knowledge-sharing. We were pushing out the beta launch and simultaneously exploring B2B community solutions for brands. But we had a retention problem — users weren’t coming back.

Along the persona spectrum, we had two types: Community Builders (leaders who create and share knowledge) and Knowledge Seekers (followers who consume it). Both were dropping off after first use.

The business needed three things at once: solve B2C retention, define the undefined B2B product, and generate enough brand interest to raise capital. Four months to figure it out.

The Interesting Challenge

This wasn’t a single design problem — it was three entangled ones.

The B2C retention issue had no clear diagnosis. Users just… didn’t come back. The B2B direction was entirely undefined — we had a flower brand vaguely interested but nothing concrete. And the business needed traction with brands to fundraise, which meant whatever we built had to be demonstrable and compelling, fast.

The constraint that made it genuinely hard: any solution for retention had to work programmatically. I couldn’t manually craft a returning user journey for every persona-behavior combination. A second return was no different from a third or fourth. The system had to scale.

How I Thought About It

I was designing the returning user journey when I hit a wall. The right prompt to give returning users was unclear — it depended on persona, behavior history, and goals we hadn’t aligned on as a team. I could design one-off flows, but they’d break the moment a new behavior pattern emerged.

That’s when I reframed the problem: instead of designing journeys, I should design a system. A programmatic engagement engine that could navigate any user, whenever they came back.

I proposed a framework with three parts:

1. User goals — defined per persona, prioritized by UX value and business objectives
2. Engagement triggers — the behavioral signals that activate a response
3. Engagement methods — the actual interventions (what the user sees and does)

Step 1: Define

I ran workshops across design, engineering, stakeholders, and marketing to align on user goals for both Knowledge Seekers and Community Builders. For each goal, we defined priority level, triggers, and methods.

Getting cross-functional alignment here was critical — these goals would directly map to the success metrics we’d measure in beta. If the team wasn’t aligned on what “engaged” meant, we’d be measuring the wrong things.

Step 2: Ideate and Research

I selected key user goals and ran brainstorming sessions. Before each session, I prepared secondary research on engagement best practices — specifically gamification mechanisms — to give team members unfamiliar with the space concrete prompts to riff on.

After the sessions, I synthesized the affinity map into a tiered framework:

The signal was clear: we needed to focus on a challenge/competition system and a reward system. These appeared most frequently, solved across personas, and directly addressed the retention gap.

Step 3: Apply

I mapped the engagement methods back to the defined user goals and began designing the challenge and reward system. But something unexpected happened — the B2C insights became the key to unlocking the B2B opportunity.

Key Decision 1: Pivot to Embedded Community

The signal

While we were still designing the gamification features, a publicist representing major consumer brands reached out. He was interested in our community tools — specifically the gamification and moderation capabilities. Through conversations with him and other potential clients, three insights emerged:

What I decided

Instead of bringing brands to our platform, we would build community solutions inside their apps — an embedded community product.

What I considered

The previous approach — building brand communities on Klip’s platform — was moving slowly and required brands to redirect their users elsewhere. We also explored affiliate programs, but they didn’t generate revenue while building traction. The embedded approach solved both: brands keep their users, we provide the engagement infrastructure.

Why this won

It aligned the B2C work with the B2B opportunity. The engagement system I’d already designed — challenges, rewards, moderation — was exactly what brands needed. We weren’t starting from scratch; we were repositioning existing design work for a massive market.

Key Decision 2: Rapid Branded Prototyping

With a meeting scheduled with the publicist’s team in two weeks, I had to make the embedded community concept tangible. Fast.

What I decided

I designed a branded product demo showing the embedded community inside a real brand’s app (Dunkin’ Donuts as a demonstration case), focusing on three pillars:

Why this approach

The mockups had to be more than wireframes — they needed to let the client see themselves in the product. I designed the templates to be easily editable so we could swap branding for any prospective client without rebuilding.

What Shipped

The pitch landed. The client team’s response:

“This mockup is very to the point and it’s exactly what we want. We believe many brands would be interested in this.”

They immediately had several top consumer brands interested. The door was open.

What I built

• A user engagement system that programmatically solves for retention across personas and behaviors
• Gamification features (challenge + reward system) that became the core differentiator for the B2B product
• Editable branded mockup templates that scaled to pitch any consumer brand — not just one client

Reflection

What was hardest: The first mockup iteration missed the mark, and the pressure nearly fractured the team. Sales, engineering, and design were all stressed and talking past each other. I ended up being the senior designer who had to hold it together. The key was adapting communication to each audience — for sales, I led with summaries and quick visualizations rather than design rationale. For stakeholders, I synthesized competing perspectives before presenting options. The second version landed because people felt understood.

What I navigated: A stakeholder wanted to copy a dark-pattern gamification feature — paying users cents per video swipe. Instead of just arguing against it, I set up a user interview with a community builder the stakeholder trusted. The right questions during that conversation redirected focus back to the challenge and reward system we’d designed. Sometimes the best design tool is knowing which conversation to arrange.

What this taught me: The engagement system I built for B2C retention became the foundation for an entirely different business model. That only happened because I designed it as a system — modular, principled, persona-agnostic — rather than a set of one-off features. Systems thinking doesn’t just solve the current problem. It creates options you didn’t plan for.