Loadout

Loadout’s founders wanted a launch platform for game studios that compressed the runway problem: get demo, get funded, get shipping — without chasing publishers, running campaign-style crowdfunds, or navigating insider-heavy token rounds. I led product design end-to-end, designed the brand and pitch deck, and built the production frontend.

Two audiences were broken at once.

For game studios: fundraising isn’t a core skillset. Teams hit demo stage and run out of runway. Publishers are slow, selective, and control-heavy. There’s no simple way to turn early interest into capital.

For crypto gaming investors: most bets are on debut studios with no shipped track record. Private rounds create insiders with cheaper tokens. Unlock cliffs hit later and crush price structure. There’s no consistent pipeline of vetted teams to back early.

Both problems share one root cause: the existing rails treat funding and discovery as separate, sequential events. Loadout’s bet was that they should be the same event.

The core design challenge was making a complex financial product feel simple without dumbing it down. Bonding curves, graduation thresholds, treasury routing, and fee splits all need to be understood by both studios setting up their project and investors evaluating it. The answer was progressive disclosure: studios use launch presets so they can ship without understanding token engineering, while investor-facing pages surface live data — treasury growth, holder count, graduation progress — for people who want to dig in.

That principle drove the whole product: presets and defaults for the people who shouldn’t have to care, real-time signal for the people who do.

Three coordinated surfaces, all driven by the same brand and design system:

• The studio create flow. Trailer, demo, docs, team, roadmap, use of funds, then a tier and preset selection that hides the token engineering behind sensible defaults.
• The investor-facing project page. Market panel with live treasury, graduation progress, holders, and trade activity — built so people can price risk in real time rather than betting on a whitepaper.
• The pitch deck and marketing site. Same brand system, same UI components, so investors evaluating Loadout were already looking at the actual product.

I built the frontend myself, end-to-end (Figma → Figma Make → Cursor → dev handoff). That removed the usual translation loss between design handoff and implementation. Every layout, interaction, and responsive decision was weighed against build cost in real time, which cut speculative complexity early and kept the Figma honest about what would ship.

Loadout raised its seed round using the deck I designed. The platform shipped with a frontend that matched the original designs because I built it myself. The brand system carried through from product UI to pitch deck to marketing site, keeping everything consistent without requiring alignment meetings or brand documentation.

Building the frontend myself changed how I designed. Decisions that would normally surface as handoff friction got resolved at the Figma stage, because I knew what would actually be expensive to build. The pitch deck reinforced something I keep seeing: the best decks show the product, they don’t explain it. Because I’d already built the brand and UI, the deck featured real screens, and investors were evaluating the actual product experience rather than a promise of what it might become.