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Calyptus: Scaling from <10K to 120K Users
Leading the Product Design Turnaround that Drove 12X+ User Growth and Realigned Market Fit for a Recruitment Platform.
Project Context & Problem:
Before summer 2023, Calyptus was a buggy MVP with fewer than 10K users and no product-market fit. After a strategic pivot, I was hired to lead the product design and build a second MVP in 6 months — covering both candidate and recruiter roles.
Our goal: attract 80K candidates post-launch to drive traction on the recruiter side. This case study focuses on the candidate-facing experience.
My Role & Influence:
I led end-to-end product design, from research to dev handoff. I worked closely with:
3 co-founders
A product manager (focused on engineering)
Back-end and front-end developers
I was the only designer and the go-to person for decisions, alignment, and quality across both sides of the product.
My Challenges in the Process:
Time & Budget Constraints: Research time was limited. Developers were already building. I prioritized key flows and deferred edge cases and additional states.
Minimal User Access: Direct access to users was rare. I had to rely on proxy input and external research to stay grounded in real needs.
Simultaneously Designing for Two User Personas: I designed for both candidates and recruiters. With little candidate data, I turned to external sources; for recruiters, I leaned on insights from our internal hiring team.
Balancing a Small Cross-functional Team: IWorking across a small team of co-founders, PMs, and engineers, I had to balance collaboration with ownership. I learned to process feedback calmly, challenge assumptions, and prioritize based on impact.
Sole Designer Advocacy: As the sole design voice, I backed every key decision with data, reasoning, and UX principles — turning discussions into decisions without falling into opinion battles.
Research & Insights
User Interviews
We conducted 5 interviews with users of the v1 platform. From those conversations, several key pain points emerged:
Desk Research
To strengthen findings, I reviewed:
Case studies of successful recruiting tools
Research papers on candidate psychology
Job seeker stories on LinkedIn
This helped clarify the emotional and practical barriers users faced — especially around trust, energy, and confidence.
Key Insights:
Mapping Core Structure
I mapped user flows and IA, revealing a blind spot in the post-application journey. To fix this, I ran a workshop — which led to us adding a chat feature with recruiter response templates, improving transparency and speed of feedback, which was one of the main pain point for the candidates.
Research Summary:
As a result of the research, I defined primary user pains I should focus on:
Being Ignored: Users were often ghosted by recruiters or didn't get feedback after applying.
Slow Hiring: The process of finding a job took too much time.
Constant Proof: Users had to prove their skills and experience repeatedly.
Early Mismatches: It was hard to know early on if a company was a good fit, wasting time.
Ideation & Design System:
I started with a lo-fi drafts based on research and business goals.
Then, I conducted review sessions with the team, evaluating designs against 3 key criteria:
Are main actions obvious?
Can devs build this quickly?
Does this serve a business goal?
Based on the feedback:
Redesigned the job card in the jobs pool to provide clearer context about the position before users decide to apply
Hid job preferences since they weren’t essential to display constantly
Reworked the layout to enhance content hierarchy and make scanning easier
Moved job requirements to the top for better visibility and reduced scrolling
Increased the prominence of matched skills
Reworded the main CTA button for greater clarity
Design System
I initiated the creation of a custom design system inspired by the clean, efficient style of Tailwind UI. For each master component, I provided detailed documentation to support the development team.
This system ultimately reduced idea-to-hand-off time by at least 5 times and helped the front-end development team work 2x faster post-launch due to its reusability.
Guerrilla Testing
We couldn’t run proper user testing due to tight deadlines. So I organized guerrilla testing internally and logged structured feedback in Excel.
It surfaced valuable insights, but also biases:
Social Desirability Bias: Stakeholders were too positive, making real issues harder to catch
False Consensus: Founders assumed their perspective reflected users. Later, Hotjar recordings revealed misalignments
Post-Release. Problems & My Solutions:
Problem 1: Onboarding Overload
The onboarding process, designed to gather basic user info for our matching algorithm, became excessively long (2 + 9 steps), causing a 60% drop-off rate; only 31% of users completed profiles.
I shortened onboarding to 4 steps, made it appear in context, and showed it after giving immediate value - top job positions. This boosted 100% profile completion from 31% to 49%, reducing drop-off to ~25%.
Problem 2: Low Matching Rates
Users experienced very low job matching rates, which discouraged them and contributed to high user churn.
Increasing profile completion also positively impacted the general match score. But the biggest gain came from removing "low match" labels, showing only the percentage.
Problem 3: Cumbersome Verification Process
It was cumbersome, intimidating and a long process to verify experience (especially current workplace experience), with only 28% completing verification.
I added self-experience verification to simplify the process and make it less intimidating, which increased the amount of experience verification from 28% to 65%, further impacting the general match score.
Result:
We exceeded the 80K acquisition goal in 6 months, reaching 90K, then 120K shortly after. The new version helped the team land new recruiting partners and begin scaling the business.
What I Would Do Differently:
Push for early testing — no matter what.
I usually build usability testing into every phase. This time, the timeline didn’t allow it. Guerrilla testing helped, but it wasn’t enough. Next time, I’ll build in testing time up front, even in small doses, to avoid late-stage risks.
Follow the money sooner.
While we focused on candidates, research revealed that recruiters were the ones funding the platform. That insight pushed me to shift attention to recruiter flows in the next iteration — aligning product design with business priorities.
Get in touch
I’m always interested in exploring new opportunities, collaborating, or exchanging ideas with like-minded individuals. Feel free to email me or connect on LinkedIn if you'd like to discuss an open product designer or ux/ui designer position or a potential project.