Huddles: Shaping the new era of creator monetization.

Huddles (formerly Clash) was a creator-first social platform focused on helping creators build sustainable businesses through fan engagement and monetization. Following the acquisition of Byte, the company set out to rebuild the app from the ground up—combining Byte's architecture and user base with a more mature brand identity, scalable design system, and new creator monetization experiences.

The goal was to redefine fan engagement by putting creators in control of the experience while creating a platform capable of scaling with the rapidly growing creator economy.

As the company's Product Design Lead, I owned end-to-end product design, partnering closely with founders, engineering, marketing, sales, creator success, and executive leadership across the U.S. and Japan.

My responsibilities included:

Most social platforms made it difficult for creators to build sustainable income. Monetization tools were limited, platform revenue shares were high, and engagement metrics rarely reflected the strength of a creator's community.

We believed the future wasn't only helping creators reach more people—it was also helping them build stronger relationships with the people who already cared most.

Our challenge was to design a platform where creators could:

Working closely with product and business stakeholders, we identified two core opportunities: strengthening creator-fan relationships and making monetization feel like a natural extension of engagement.

This led to a suite of interconnected creator tools, including:

Rather than building isolated features, each experience reinforced the others to create a sustainable creator ecosystem.

Because monetization touched nearly every part of the business, collaboration was critical.

I partnered with executive leadership, marketing, creator success, engineering, and product teams across the U.S. and Japan to align business strategy with technical feasibility. We validated concepts through creator interviews, focus groups, A/B testing, and rapid MVP releases—iterating continuously based on real user feedback.

As the company grew, I also helped scale the design organization through mentoring new design-hires while establishing regular design critiques and collaborative workflows.

To support rapid product growth, I created a scalable design system from the ground up.

This included:

The system became the foundation for every subsequent product release, enabling faster iteration while maintaining consistency across the platform.

The launch exceeded expectations, validating both the product strategy and creator-first approach.

Highlights included:

Beyond the product itself, the design system and collaboration model I established enabled the team to scale rapidly while continuing to ship new creator experiences after launch.