Before Craze became a product, the founders were running a small experiment on Discord, a space where users wagered points on live events while the team manually managed trades and prizes. It was their way of testing how prediction-driven communities behave in real time.

Once the experiment gained momentum, I joined as the designer to help shape that early chaos into a coherent mobile experience, one that made ‘trading on events’ simple, structured, and engaging.

Migrate ~200 Discord users to a dedicated mobile platform with structured, event-based trading flows.

Streamline navigation and introduce clear divisions by event type and timing.

Build a foundation for scalable discussions and trades around real-world events.
 

Outcome: Grew to 40,000+ users within the first few months post-launch.

Leveraging Craze’s existing Discord community as an observation ground provided valuable understanding of how users interacted with event predictions through command-based bots.

These insights guided the move from a fragmented, bot-driven experience to a cohesive, visual trading environment that felt intuitive and rewarding.

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Design Benchmarking:
Apps like Robinhood and Kalshi informed the approach to clarity, modularity, and trust cues — but Craze differentiated itself by combining these with social engagement loops drawn from community behavior on Discord.&nbsp;&nbsp;

The most engaged members of the Discord community (around 10 folks) acted as a reference to our user persona, as they represented the core power users of the product.

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The app was designed with a light theme, focused on providing an easily navigable platform for the early adopters migrating from Discord.  We included referral programs in order to grow the user base via incentivized word-of-mouth.  

The first app went out as an APK file that the users could install from our website.

After exploring various visual styles, we decided on a sleek, dark-themed interface and followed patterns based on popular stock-broking apps we referred to in the research phase. 

The dark theme was chosen to enhance readability and create a sophisticated look and feel. We also opted for neuomorphism for a visually engaging and modern aesthetic. 

We iterated on these designs based on the feedback from the Discord community, ensuring the design was both visually appealing and easy to navigate.

We finally released the App on the Play-store &amp; the App-store!

Users could install the app, onboard in a few simple steps and get ₹50 as bonus to make their first trade!

A major issue this helped us overcome, was the under-involvement of iOS users in the MVP crowd as they couldn't install applications with an APK file.

As users grew, our analytics painted a better picture of how unique users perceived the platform and where the pitfalls existed.

While we received overwhelmingly positive feedback from users, the project eventually concluded due to market forces and factors outside our control. &nbsp;

This project significantly enhanced my skills in user-centered design and the importance of close collaboration with developers. It reinforced the value of iterative design and continuous user feedback.  

If I were to work on a similar project again, I would allocate more time for user research early in the process to comprehensively understand user behaviours and try to read between the lines of their actions and claims. 

Despite the project's premature conclusion, I'm incredibly proud of our creation.  The user feedback validated our efforts and demonstrated the app's potential to revolutionize opinion trading interactions at a social level. 

I gained valuable experience collaborating within a small team, constantly refining our product, and learning to navigate the complexities of balancing functionality and aesthetics.

Converted a Discord-based experiment into an opinion-trading platform used by 40k+ people to trade ~1cr per month

Months prior to Craze, the founders ran a Discord server where members wagered points on live events while the team manually managed trades and prizes. It was their way of testing how prediction-driven communities behave in real time.

As the experiment gained momentum, I joined as the designer to help shape that early chaos into a coherent mobile experience, one that made ‘trading on events’ simple, structured, and engaging.

 Grew to 40,000+ users within the first few months post-launch.

make header images for: Primary Competitors and "Design references"

Design Benchmarking:
Apps like Robinhood and Kalshi informed the approach to clarity, modularity, and trust cues — but Craze differentiated itself by combining these with social engagement loops drawn from community behavior on Discord.  

Taking an event-trading mobile app from 0->1 for 40k users

• Handled all of design from Interface, graphics, web design, marketing content and blog collaborations.
• Revamped the marketing media and User experience, simplifying the flows and segregating core
functionalities, contributing to a 56% increase in click through rates and 37% in user acquisition.


• Designed the product experience from ground up for both MVP and final stages. 
• Shipped multiple facets for the product from branding and experience to advertisements.
• Contributed to a user base of 40k and upwards of INR 1 crore in trades monthly. 
• Learnt a lot about the industry and got to work with a great team!
• Worked on the branding and initial UI concepts for a new product line.

• Handling everything, Design and Research
• Part of the founding team.

This is a concise look into my thesis project.&nbsp;Find the entire paper&nbsp;<a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-67431-0_14">Here</a>

Mobile devices are super-personal. Each user has their own learned, if not habituated, way of navigating the device interface. This insight derived from the research directed the primary objective and goal of this exercise.

Reason's for choosing to design for android only for this project:

Progressive web-Apps Wrapped Natively. A novel solution to App Fatigue.

This is a concise look into my thesis project. Find the entire paper 

Reason's for choosing to design for android only for this project:

Research Paper: Fighting App Fatigue with an OS level approach

Samarth made gorgeous designs for the Craze app and made tens of thousands of users fall in love with the aesthetics and the simplicity of its interface. He never failed to amaze us with his out-of-the-box thinking which showed in all his design iterations. He's an amazing designer to work with, and understands the intricacies of designing a great consumer app.

Taking an event-trading mobile app from 0->1 for 40k users

Samarth. R.S