My Mixtapez · 2012 – 2017
A street-culture music product, designed from inside the community.
My Mixtapez
The hardest problem
Growth was the constant pressure — more users, more labels, more platforms — but the product only worked because it felt like culture, not a generic streaming app. When SoundCloud shipped Pulse, it was a clear copy of what we had built. That told us something important: competitors wanted our identity, not just our features. The design job was to keep that identity legible while the business scaled.
Every major decision balanced reach with the street-music community the product was built around.
SoundCloud Pulse mirrored our model — validation that we were reading the market before incumbents caught up.
Most users were on slow networks. Image quality, file size, and load time were product decisions — improved iteratively over time.
Community & research
Research was not a separate phase — it never switched off. Twitter conversations, user interviews, and usage patterns fed straight into roadmap decisions. NBA player Chris Bosh talked about the app publicly. I used that visibility — and the trust we built with artists and listeners — to help sell the product vision to record labels, not just pitch features.
The design team was in daily conversation with users on Twitter — insight flowed straight into roadmap decisions.
Artists from the street gained visibility on the platform before labels and mainstream channels caught on.
Design and research helped package locality and listening insight so labels understood why the platform mattered.
My contribution
I joined as an intern in the Photoshop era and left as Head of Design five years later. I earned that path by building more than screens: I recruited and mentored the design team, owned the product from logo to full app concept — much of which still defines the product today — and kept design close to users while the company scaled from ~72K to ~25M people.
Before discovery feeds were standard, finding new music meant search. We built discovery around what had just been added, recent drops, and locality — patterns competitors later copied because the community had already validated them with us.
Music popularity varied by city and region. Research showed an artist could dominate in New York while another led in Los Angeles. I did not just surface the insight — I packaged it into the pitch we took to record labels: a commercial reason to work with the platform. User behavior became the sales story.
We built My Mixtapez Music Management (M4) to handle uploads and make locality and listening data available to labels — helping them sign artists with real regional signal instead of guesswork.
The experience had to feel complete on each platform — genuinely native on iOS and Android, not a wrapped web product. We prioritized clarity and intuition so exclusive drops and discovery flows were obvious the first time someone opened the app.
How I grew
I took on more ownership as the product grew, shifting from individual craft to product direction and design leadership. Two things scaled with the product because I built them: the community-led identity that made us defensible, and a design team of 2–4 designers that never lost its direct line to users.
The product today
I led design from 2012 to 2017. MyMixtapez is still live in 2026, past 25M users and still community-first — now with video and podcasts on top. The screens here are today's app: proof the product and the community outlasted any single screen.
Impact
In a market full of competitors, we went from ~72K users to ~25M in five years. Exclusive album launches with Meek Mill and Lil Wayne put the app at the center of culture, and locality data gave labels a commercial reason to work with us. Design stayed easy to read, native on every platform, and grounded in what the community told us would work — before the metrics proved it.