Fiction Taps
My first self-funded product — a chat-stories app for the German market.
Caso de estudio en inglés
Fiction Taps was my first self-funded product. I designed it from scratch and owned the whole lifecycle: design, content and business.
Build a market that did not exist yet.
Chat stories — fiction told as text messages, short, made for the commute — were taking off in the US. Nothing existed in German, so we built it ourselves: a self-funded iOS app, no client, no safety net.
Designing the app was one part of the job. I was also dealing with German-language content, retention, monetization and an international remote team on our own dime.
Designer, stakeholder, and owner in one.
On your own product, "sole UX designer" undersells it. I was also the stakeholder, the content strategist, and the person keeping the lights on.
Making sure I was not designing for Americans.
The German chat-stories market did not exist, so almost every reference was American. Interviews, surveys, personas, journey maps, competitive analysis — mostly to avoid designing for a US audience by default.
Self-funded means every constraint is real. I handled the prototyping, testing, iteration and shipping myself.
Stories you tap through.
Fiction Taps shipped with a chat-format reader, a content library, and a monetization layer. Stories unfolded as conversations you tap through, built for the commute.
Design was only one lever.
We tested in-app and in small interview cohorts. The strongest signal went beyond interface usability: which stories people wanted, what length felt right and what tone landed in German.
Running the whole product forced me to think beyond UX. Content, acquisition, retention and monetization all shaped whether it could grow, and there was nobody else to hand those questions to.
2017shipped to the App Store
3 yrsowning the full product lifecycle
0 → 1concept to launch, self-funded
- Product quality and distribution are one problem when you own the whole thing.
- Building an app on your own dime is endless work. Watching it evolve is also extremely fun.
- Being designer, stakeholder, owner, and content strategist taught me what every other role does. It made me a better collaborator.
- The most useful research was not about UX. It was about which stories the German market actually wanted.