Turning Abandonment into Revenue

Why This Problem, Why Now

The numbers told a story that couldn't be ignored. Brands were creating jobs at a rapidly decreasing rate, and the ones they started were being abandoned before completion. For a marketplace that takes a percentage of platform spend, fewer jobs meant less revenue. This wasn't a feature request—it was a business crisis.

#paid operates as a two-sided marketplace. Brands come to find creators for sponsored content. Creators come to find paid opportunities. The platform takes a cut of every transaction. When brands stop posting jobs, the entire flywheel grinds to a halt.

The job creation flow was the critical entry point. If brands couldn't get through it, nothing else mattered. Support tickets were piling up with the same complaints: the process was confusing, took too long, and didn't make sense. Something was fundamentally broken.

Working with the PM and data team, we aligned on a north-star metric: quality of creator matches. Completion rate mattered, but not if brands finished faster only to get worse applications. The revenue decline made this urgent—we didn't have months to experiment.

The Disconnect

Before diving into solutions, I needed to understand what was actually happening. One pattern emerged immediately: there was a total disconnect between what brands were inputting and what creators were seeing.

Brands were crafting thoughtful qualifier questions—"Do you own any of our products already?", "What type of dog do you have?", "What is your nearest airport, in case of on-site requirements?"—nuanced questions designed to find the right creators.

But on the creator side, these became meaningless yes/no toggles labeled "Nice-to-haves." A question about airport proximity became a binary choice that told creators nothing about why it mattered. The disconnect wasn't just confusing—it was undermining the entire matching process.

Digging Deeper

Working with support, I led a research initiative across three tracks: focused interviews with brands who had abandoned job creation, shadowing sessions to watch them struggle in real-time, and a deep-dive into support tickets to identify patterns.

Using Dovetail to synthesize the findings, clear themes emerged: complexity, length, disconnect, and creator experience kept surfacing. Brands weren't struggling with individual fields—they were drowning in the sheer volume of decisions presented all at once.

The Actual Problem

The research revealed the root cause: job creation was too long, overly complex, and disconnected from the creator experience.

The existing flow was an endless form. Every field, every option, every setting—all visible at once in a single scrolling page. Brands would start at the top with good intentions and abandon somewhere in the middle, overwhelmed by decisions they weren't ready to make.

There was no sense of progress. No indication of what came next. No preview of what creators would actually see. Brands were filling out fields in a vacuum, hoping it would all make sense on the other side.

What We Considered (and Killed)

Before landing on the final approach, we explored alternatives. Each solved part of the problem while creating new ones.

The insight: the problem wasn't the number of fields. It was presenting them all at once with no feedback on what they meant. Brands needed structure and visibility, not less control.

The Solution

The redesign centered on three principles that emerged directly from the research:

Chunk it. Break the endless form into discrete, manageable steps. Each step focused on a single category of decisions. A sidebar showed progress and allowed navigation between sections.

Clarify outcomes. For every input, show what creators would see. Custom qualifiers now displayed the expected answer format—yes, no, or open-ended—so brands understood how their questions would land.

Synchronize. A live preview panel showed exactly what the job post would look like to creators, updating in real-time as brands filled out each field. No more guessing. No more disconnect. The creator team confirmed the preview matched their experience exactly—and surfaced how qualifiers were confusing creators.

This came with tradeoffs. The live preview meant engineering complexity—I partnered closely with the eng lead to find an efficient path. Brands lost some layout customization in exchange for clarity. Given the revenue urgency, worth it.

The new design maintained all the same functionality—nothing was removed. But by restructuring how information was presented and adding real-time feedback, we transformed an overwhelming experience into a guided journey.

Measurable Impact

The results came quickly. Within three months of launch, every key metric had shifted dramatically.

Brands weren't just completing more jobs—they were creating better ones. The live preview meant fewer mismatched expectations. The chunked structure meant fewer support tickets asking "where do I find X?" The clarified qualifiers meant more relevant creator applications.

The business impact was undeniable. More jobs created meant more matches. More matches meant more platform transactions. More transactions meant more revenue. A UX problem had become a $1.5M+ opportunity.

What Happened Next

The success of the job creation redesign had ripple effects across the platform. The "synchronize" pattern—showing live previews of outputs—became a design principle adopted in other flows. The research insights about disconnect informed how the team approached creator-facing experiences.

Most importantly, the methodology proved out. By starting with research, identifying root causes rather than surface symptoms, and validating with real users throughout, we shipped something that actually worked. Not just shipped—something that transformed how brands engaged with the platform. Validating with both brands and creators throughout became a model for subsequent projects.

The endless form is gone. In its place: a structured, guided experience that respects brands' time and attention while giving them the tools to find the right creators. That's the job.