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Building a Platform for Adventurers

 

Lyfx was founded in California in 2018 with the mission of connecting adventurers with local guides for unique outdoor experiences.

As a Creative & Product partner, I was involved in building the platform from the ground up and developing the brand voice and launch campaign. My responsibilities included designing the UI/UX framework and creating the launch campaign.

In the first year, Lyfx acquired users in 30 different countries and featured over 1,500 outdoor experiences in the app.

 
 
 

Designing the Mobile Experience

 
 

As the lead designer for the app's first iteration, I led a small, remote team of multidisciplinary developers to create dozens of UX flows, over 500 unique screens, and a custom library of UI components. The process took 8 months to complete.

 
 
 
 
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Activating the Platform

 

To launch our new platform on a budget, we created a Social Ad Generator tool that automatically generated hundreds of ads by extracting graphics and text from our image and copy banks.

Each ad had slight variations in imagery, layout, and language, and their performance on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter was tracked by the tool. The ads that performed the best were kept running — this Darwinian process led to an always-evolving social campaign that was based on real-time engagement metrics.

Our approach was successful, and we saw a significant increase in our user base within a few weeks of releasing the app.

 
 

To amplify our IRL presence we also created a limited-edition range of Lyfx swag featuring wearable maps of adventure hotspots across the country.

 
 
 
 

To capture the adventurous spirit of our brand we created our own original adventure documentary, “Guanaco”. The short film follows the company's founder, Pedro McCardell, on a 12,000-mile motorbike journey through Patagonia, with all images captured on an iPhone. The film tells the story of the fellow adventurers McCardell met along the way, as well as a poignant encounter with a young Guanaco struggling to break free from a fence wire.

Guanaco was a semi-finalist at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Film Awards and has been featured in various international adventure film festivals.