StreamVault wanted to let everyday people invest in independent films, podcasts, and music projects. We designed a platform that makes media investing as intuitive as browsing a streaming service, while meeting all the compliance requirements of a regulated financial product.
StreamVault had a bold idea but a complicated problem. They wanted to democratize media investment, allowing anyone to invest as little as $25 into independent creative projects. But the product sat at the intersection of entertainment and finance, two industries with very different design expectations. The platform needed to feel exciting enough to attract media enthusiasts while being professional enough to satisfy SEC compliance requirements and build investor trust.
Their founding team had tried building a prototype with a freelance developer, but the result looked like a crowdfunding site with a stock ticker bolted on. Users in their beta test didn't understand whether they were donating or investing, and the legal disclosures were buried so deep that their compliance advisor flagged it as a regulatory risk.
We approached this as a dual-track design challenge. On one track, we needed to create an experience that felt like discovering new content on a platform you already love. On the other, we needed to build trust signals and compliance workflows that institutional partners would accept during due diligence.
We conducted user interviews with 20 beta testers and 5 accredited investors. The insights were revealing.
We designed the project discovery experience to feel like browsing a curated streaming platform. Each project gets a rich media page with trailer, creator bio, market analysis, financial projections, and risk factors. But unlike a crowdfunding page, the investment flow is structured with clear regulatory language, risk acknowledgments, and verification steps that don't feel like obstacles.
The key design decision was introducing what we called "investment cards." These are compact, visual summaries that show project type, target raise, current progress, projected returns, and risk level in a scannable format. Users can compare multiple investment cards side by side before committing, similar to comparing products on an e-commerce site.
For the post-investment experience, we designed a portfolio dashboard that tracks active investments, shows real-time project updates from creators, displays earnings and distributions, and provides downloadable tax documents. We treated post-investment as seriously as pre-investment because retention and repeat investment were critical to StreamVault's business model.
This was our most comprehensive project to date, spanning 12 weeks across product strategy, UI/UX design, and front-end development. We delivered responsive web designs, a React-based component library, interactive prototypes for investor presentations, and a compliance-approved disclosure flow. The platform launched to a waitlist of 3,000 users who had signed up during the design phase.