Our work / Freespoke
Turning one million users into a daily habit.
Freespoke could draw a crowd. On a single election night the privacy-first search platform captured over a million users. The problem was keeping them — without structural changes, that audience would be gone by morning.
We partnered with Freespoke's CEO on one clear product challenge: convert a spike into retention.
Where they were
Freespoke helps people navigate the information landscape by showing perspectives across the political spectrum and labelling source bias, without tracking users or shaping feeds algorithmically. It worked as a tool. It didn't yet work as a habit — there was no reason to open it on an ordinary Tuesday.
What we set out to change
Establish a clear position: the platform for people who want what a single-source feed doesn't show them.
Build features that create repeat usage rather than one-off visits.
Open a credible path from free user to Freespoke Unlimited subscriber.
Give the brand an ownable visual system that reads as trustworthy and politically neutral.
Use high-intent moments — the midterms — as an entry point to the whole product.
The elections portal
Rather than a standalone microsite, we designed the portal as an extension of the wider platform: consistent navigation and UI, deliberate pathways back into Search and News, and engagement loops that survive past election night. Live race data from Decision Desk HQ gave real-time calls without giving up the accuracy the brand depends on.
A flexible map and toolbar system let users move between national Senate and House views, with state-level aggregation widgets instead of race-by-race navigation. Everything was designed in Figma as reusable components — race widgets, map states, data states, navigation — so Freespoke's own team could scale and iterate without us in the room.
A retention MVP in four weeks
Follow Topics let users subscribe to evolving stories, receive personalised updates, and build a version of the platform that was theirs. Built and launched in a month, it was the piece that moved Freespoke from a search box to something people opened daily.
KPIs, subscriptions and brand
We defined the metrics that connected product decisions to business outcomes — daily active usage, retention, subscription conversion, session depth — and used them to inform roadmap priorities, paywall placement and feature gating. Alongside that, an Americana-rooted visual system gave the platform something ownable in a category of generic tech-news design, plus a video-first content strategy for demos, paid social and organic storytelling.
What it turned into
The engagement didn't end at delivery. It became an embedded extension of the Freespoke team: ongoing UX and UI support, paid ad creative, landing pages, product marketing visuals and rapid iteration on new experiments — the capacity of an internal creative department without the cost of building one.