Trendin — the right influencers, the right audience, real results

Trendin logo

Product DesignerGreen-field SaaSInfluencer Marketing

Trendin is an all-in-one influencer marketing platform for agencies and brands — from finding the right creator to planning, running, and reporting on a full campaign. As the only designer on the team since September 2023, I've owned product design end to end: research, wireframes, UI, prototyping, user testing, and handoff to development.

What I did

  • Designed the entire product experience from the ground up — registration and onboarding, pricing, and every core feature: the influencer database, analytical tools, and campaign management
  • Shaped complex, multi-stakeholder workflows (agency, client, influencer) into simple, usable interfaces
  • Ran user research and testing directly with agency staff to validate every major feature before development
  • Designed beyond the app: sales deck, lead-gen ebook, email templates, marketing site

What I learned

  • How to turn messy, non-linear real-world workflows (three people, three approval stages) into a single clear interface
  • How to work as a team of one designer across product, sales, and marketing — and when to pull in the team vs. decide alone
  • How to validate ideas cheaply: paper sketches and prototype testing before a single line of code is written
  • How to design for two very different audiences at once — internal agency users and their external, non-technical clients

The problem

Influencer marketing agencies live in spreadsheets. Choosing the right influencer for a campaign means digging through screenshots and half-updated trackers just to answer basic questions: Is this creator's audience real? Who have they worked with before — and did they just do a campaign for a client's direct competitor?

Once the campaign actually starts, the mess multiplies. Casting decks get built by hand in PowerPoint. Client feedback lives in email threads, WhatsApp, and comments on five different spreadsheets. Content plans are rebuilt from scratch for every campaign, differently, by every campaign manager. And when someone goes on vacation, handing off a campaign is a small nightmare of scattered files and half-remembered conversations.

Trendin replaces all of that with one workspace: a searchable database of 300M+ influencer profiles, deep analytics on audience quality and brand history, and a campaign hub that takes agencies from casting to reporting without a single exported spreadsheet.

My process

As the sole designer, I didn't have the luxury of narrow scope — everything from core features to the smaller edges of the product came through me. What stayed constant was how I got there:

  1. 1

    Paper first

    Every feature starts as hand-drawn wireframes. It's the fastest way to throw away bad ideas before anyone gets attached to them.

  2. 2

    Structure the thinking

    I move the concept into an AI tool to organize it into something the whole team can react to at our product meeting — problem, options, open questions.

  3. 3

    MVP definition

    Being a small team, we'd shape a lean MVP description together before any pixel got polished — what's essential now, what can wait.

  4. 4

    Design

    In Figma, I try out multiple layouts before settling on one — pushing a design through several directions until it actually feels right, then building it out into a full interactive high-fidelity prototype.

  5. 5

    Test before we build

    We user-tested prototypes with real agency people before writing a line of code, so we caught confusion and dead ends while they were still cheap to fix.

Casting flow sketch
Comments & messaging concept
Budgeting logic on the whiteboard
Interactive Figma prototype - 'tough' times before Figma Make was a thing

THE SOLUTION - TRENDIN

Three pillars, each solving one part of that chaos: a database to find the right people fast, analytics to double-check the choice, and campaign management to run the whole thing end to end.

Influencer Database: find the right influencer in minutes, not hours

  • What it is: a searchable influencer database with advanced filtering, full statistics, and shared team access.
  • The part I'm most proud of here is the advanced filtering system — built to cut search time from hours to minutes.
  • I designed the influencer CRM so contacts and conversation history live in one shared place instead of scattered across the team's inboxes.
  • I also designed the credit system that governs how the team accesses influencer data based on subscription tier.
Database overview
Filters & AI content search
Influencer profile & statistics
Add-influencer flow
Credit & subscription management
Error state with Demo Doggo

Analytic Tools: double-check before you commit

  • What it is: Overlap and Partnership analysis, built to help agencies find the right mix of influencers before committing budget to a campaign.
  • Digging into why analysis kept failing led us to the real cause — private profiles or hidden follower counts breaking the calculation. From there, I built the flow around preventing and recovering from that failure, including a detailed in-product guide so the analysis actually succeeds instead of silently breaking.
New overlap analysis
Detect hidden followers guide
Detect private accounts guide
Early wireframe
Fix & retry failed analysis
Partnership analysis dashboard
Partnership analysis intro

Campaign Management - run the whole thing, start to finish

  • What it is: what started as a simple casting tool grew into a full system covering every step of an agency's campaign workflow in one place.
  • Casting: user testing taught me agencies didn't want a simple "yes or no, swipe left/right tiner-like" decision. I built a multi-step casting flow suited to how agencies actually work, with a client-ready output generated in seconds.
  • Budgeting: financials moved out of complicated spreadsheets and built directly into the platform.
  • Content planning & auto-detection: streamlined into the platform, removing manual tracking.
  • Reporting: replaced manual PowerPoint decks by leveraging the platform's own data to automatically generate a polished, client-ready report.
Casting stages & influencer detail
Casting status flow — happy path & edge cases
Reporting — hall of fame
Casting preview — photo selection
Add influencers from the database
Early budgeting brainstorming
Budgeting — budget & margin states
Budgeting — margin states
Campaign health status
Workflow — custom fields
Content planning calendar
Auto-detected product exposure
Demo Doggo in the 404 error state

One more thing

Somewhere along the way, a mock influencer profile I built for our free trial demo turned into Demo Doggo — Trendin's accidental mascot.
He was never supposed to be more than a placeholder, but people loved him enough that he stuck around, showing up in empty states, error pages and all around the app.

Demo Doggo as a detective with a magnifying glass

No other designers to lean on this time. Just me, a blank canvas, and a product that ended up winning real tenders.

Today, Trendin is live at used and trusted by agencies and brands across Europe. Get in touch if you want to hear more about any part of this journey.

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