Wowd

The Client

Wowd helps creators build careers through fan collaboration. The platform works like a game of telephone: a creator starts a piece, fans add their touches, and it can bounce back and forth like a game of pong, with the creator earning money each step of the way. Each contributor's work is preserved as a layer, showing the journey of the collaboration.

The Ask

The concept requires explanation. Founder Justin Molineaux wanted an animated onboarding flow that would be fun and bold, educating new users while capturing the platform's creative energy. Their designer, Nora Kako, had the design language and branding ironed out and great mocks ready; we worked together to iron out details, fill in copy, and bring everything to life with animation, which she largely left to us.

That was the headline request, not the whole engagement. We had joined in January 2022 as an extra pair of hands in their Flutter/Dart codebase, and by the time we left in May we had worked in four of their repositories: the mobile client, the backend, a link preview service we wrote from scratch, and their marketing site. The team was small, so the work went where it was needed.

The Process

The carousel came first. Using Flutter's animation tooling, we built five stages, defining animations both by drawing shapes straight in Flutter and by manipulating SVGs Nora provided.

Welcome

	Small images of actual collaborations made with the app appear and slide past the user. The hope is to showcase the work of the current userbase, and to intrigue new users into wanting to know what these strange little pieces are.

Send a request

	To teach the term "request", we stripped the UI back to broad strokes: choose a creator, choose a collaboration, send. The glowing button makes it clear that the call to action is the one showing the price.

Create together

	A collaboration plays out in miniature. A fan submits a selfie in purple, a second fan adds a haircut and a guitar in blue, and the creator arrives last to sign it in yellow. Each collaborator gets their own colour so the hand-offs read at a glance.

See the journey

	A projector-transparency interface sifts through the layers of the piece built in the previous step. What a fan receives is not just a finished image but the progression: a video, a gif, or an interactive widget showing how it came together.

Let's go

	No sign-up flow is complete without the sign-up itself. Not much went into this one beyond debating which platforms to support for multi-auth, and those choices would likely be different today.

The carousel was the part of the engagement a user could see. Most of the rest was plumbing, and the largest piece of it was getting links to behave.

Deep links without a vendor

Wowd had been using Branch.io for the links that open the app. We replaced it with a service of our own, unfurly, a small Express and Vue app doing two jobs at once. It renders a preview page for anything worth sharing, a creation, an offering, or a profile, carrying the Open Graph and Twitter tags that turn a pasted link into a card. And it hands the visitor off to the app through Apple Universal Links and Android App Links, falling back to the App Store for anyone who does not have it yet.

That meant work in all three repositories at the same time. The backend grew public endpoints so the preview pages had something to render. The service rendered them. The Flutter client learned to resolve wowd:// routes, which behave differently enough on iOS and Android that the router had to know which platform it was standing on. Branch.io came out in February.

The marketing site

Wowd needed a marketing site, so we built one: Gatsby with TypeScript and styled-components, content in MDX. Home, about, a partner enquiry page, terms, privacy, and an account deletion page, which is the least glamorous thing a consumer app has to ship and the one users go looking for. It went live in April 2022.

The same concept the carousel explains in five screens, compressed into three.

The long tail

The rest was the ordinary work of a product with people in it. Push notifications learned to deep link, including the awkward case where the app is not running at all and the notification has to carry enough to open the right screen from a cold start. Sharing a creation gained an image as well as a link, then gained a second button once it was clear that sharing and downloading are different intentions. Profile URLs learned to accept a username instead of a UUID.

The Outcome

The onboarding communicates Wowd's odd little concept through motion rather than a wall of text: a new user can grok the platform in under a minute. All animations were implemented directly in Flutter, shipping with the app on iOS and Android. The link service ran in production from February and the marketing site from April.

Wowd has since shut down, and wowd.co no longer resolves. The marketing site survives in the Internet Archive.