Arteve

Arteve is a multi-sided platform designed to help musicians discover opportunities, showcase their work, and manage bookings more clearly while helping organizers find and evaluate talent faster.

Role: Product Designer (Founder)
Timeline: 2024 – 2025
Scope: End-to-end product design 

A multi-sided platform for musicians and organizers built to reduce fragmented discovery, communication, and self-promotion.

Research & Key Insights

To understand the problem space, I explored the workflows of three primary user groups:

  • Professional musicians
  • Emerging artists
  • Event organizers

Instead of focusing on surface-level behaviors, I looked at how these users actually discover opportunities, communicate, and manage bookings in real-world scenarios.

Insight 1: Discovery is fragmented and unreliable

Musicians rely heavily on:

  • Instagram
  • Word-of-mouth
  • Personal networks

Opportunities are often hidden, inconsistent, and dependent on who you know rather than what you offer.

For emerging artists, this creates a significant barrier to entry. For professionals, it leads to inconsistent income and constant outreach effort.

Insight 2: Self-promotion is time-consuming and inefficient

Musicians spend a large portion of their time:

  • Promoting themselves
  • Reaching out to organizers
  • Maintaining multiple platforms


This shifts focus away from their actual craft.

The more time they spend finding gigs, the less time they spend improving their work.

Insight 3: Organizers lack trust and efficient filtering

Organizers face the opposite side of the problem.

Instead of too few opportunities, they often face too many options with too little clarity. Talent is frequently presented through scattered links, informal referrals, or incomplete profiles, with no structured way to compare fit, credibility, or availability.

As a result, hiring becomes:

  • Risky
  • Time-consuming
  • Inconsistent

Insight 4: Booking and communication are disconnected

Even after discovery happens, the workflow often remains fragmented.

Conversations move across direct messages, emails, and calls, while important details like availability, expectations, and next steps are handled manually or lost across channels.

This creates:

  • Miscommunication
  • Missed opportunities
  • Operational friction

Insight 5: There is no system for long-term career growth

Most existing platforms solve only one part of the problem.

They either focus on networking, like social platforms, or on one-time gig discovery, like booking marketplaces. What is missing is a more connected system that supports the full professional journey over time.

Musicians still need support across:

  • Discovery
  • Booking
  • Communication
  • Long-term visibility and growth

The Problem

Independent musicians don’t struggle because of a lack of talent — they struggle because of a lack of structure.

Most rely on a mix of Instagram, word-of-mouth, and fragmented platforms to find gigs. This leads to inconsistent opportunities, missed connections, and a constant need for self-promotion.

At the same time, event organizers and clients face the opposite problem. Finding reliable musicians is time-consuming, unpredictable, and often based on incomplete information or referrals.

There is no single place where:

  • Musicians can consistently discover opportunities
  • Organizers can confidently find and evaluate talent
  • Both sides can manage bookings and communication efficiently

 

Key Challenge

How might we create one structured platform that helps musicians discover opportunities and build credibility while helping organizers find and evaluate talent more efficiently?

Solution

Arteve is a LinkedIn-style platform for musicians — designed not just for networking, but for discovering opportunities, managing bookings, and building sustainable careers.

Instead of separating discovery, communication, and execution across different tools, Arteve brings everything into a single structured system.

The goal was not to create another social platform, but to design a product that supports the entire journey from discovery to booking.

Product Strategy

Based on the research insights, the platform was designed around three core principles:

1. Structured discovery over passive networking

Instead of relying on feeds or random connections, Arteve introduces a more intentional discovery system:

  • Musicians can showcase their work through structured profiles
  • Organizers can search and filter based on specific needs
  • Opportunities are visible and actionable

This shifts discovery from:

  • Passive scrolling
    → to
  • Goal-driven exploration

2. Reduce friction in booking and communication

To address fragmented workflows, Arteve integrates:

  • Direct messaging between musicians and organizers
  • Clear booking flows
  • Centralized communication

This removes the need for:

  • Switching between platforms
  • Managing conversations across different channels

3. Support long-term career growth, not just one-time gigs

Unlike traditional gig platforms, Arteve is designed to support:

  • Ongoing visibility
  • Repeat opportunities
  • Professional identity

Musicians are not just profiles — they are evolving professionals within a system that tracks and supports their growth.

High-level experience

The product experience was designed as a connected flow:

  1. Onboarding → Define identity and goals
  2. Profile → Showcase work and credibility
  3. Discovery → Find opportunities or talent
  4. Booking → Confirm gigs through structured flows
  5. Messaging → Communicate and coordinate seamlessly

Each step feeds into the next, creating a continuous system rather than isolated interactions.

Key Features & Design Decisions

To translate the product strategy into a working system, I focused on designing and implementing key workflows that connect discovery, communication, and booking.

1. Profiles — Establishing credibility and identity

Musicians need more than a name and photo. They need a professional presence that helps others quickly understand who they are, what they do, and why they are credible.

To address this, I designed structured profile pages that:

  • Highlight key information (experience, skills, genres, media, reviews, and activity)
  • Provide a clear overview of the artist
  • Build trust through reviews and profile depth

2. Discovery (Find Page) — Moving beyond passive browsing

Discovery in Arteve was designed to go beyond gig search.

Instead of limiting users to one type of result, the platform supports discovery across gigs, musicians, nearby venues, and events. This makes the experience more useful for both active job-seeking and broader professional networking.

Smart filters, saved preferences, and structured results help users find relevant opportunities faster while also surfacing people and places that support long-term career growth.

  • Search across gigs, musicians, venues, and events
  • Refine by location, genre, date, budget, and role
  • Support both direct opportunity search and broader discovery

3. Gig Creation (Organizer Flow) — Structuring opportunities

Arteve was also designed to support the organizer side of the marketplace.

I created a clearer workflow for posting gigs, reviewing applicants, shortlisting talent, and managing communication. This made the platform feel more complete as a two-sided product rather than a musician-only experience.

  • Captures essential details (event type, budget, requirements)
  • Standardizes how opportunities are presented
  • Makes gigs easier to discover and evaluate

4. Messaging (Chat System) — Centralizing communication

One of the biggest friction points was communication happening across multiple channels.

To solve this, I designed and implemented a centralized messaging system:

  • Direct conversations between musicians and organizers
  • Contextual communication tied to bookings or opportunities
  • Reduced reliance on external tools (Instagram, email, etc.)

5. Home & Content Layer (Bits) — Supporting visibility

Beyond direct discovery, musicians still need visibility.

I introduced Bits as a lightweight content layer where users can share updates, showcase work, and stay active within the platform. Unlike a traditional social feed, Bits was designed to support professional visibility rather than distract from it.

This helped solve an important gap: musicians are not always actively applying, but they still need ways to stay current, visible, and credible between gigs.

  • Share updates and progress
  • Showcase work and announcements
  • Stay visible without turning the platform into a noisy feed

 

Why it matters:
Bits complements discovery by helping talent stay top of mind between opportunities.

From Design to Implementation

Beyond designing these flows in Figma, I also worked on implementing key parts of the product using modern tools.

This allowed me to:

  • Validate design decisions in a real environment
  • Identify edge cases and usability gaps
  • Iterate faster based on actual product behavior

Iterations & Key Learnings

Designing Arteve wasn’t a linear process. One of the biggest shifts came from rethinking the core structure of the platform itself.

Initial Approach — One unified platform

The original idea was to build a single platform where:

  • Musicians
  • Organizers
  • Fans

could all exist and interact within the same system.

Users could switch roles within the same account, allowing flexibility between being a musician, organizer, or general user.

What didn’t work

As the product evolved, this approach introduced several challenges:

  • Role confusion
    Users were unclear about their identity within the platform, especially when switching between musician and organizer roles.
  • Feature overload
    Combining all user types into one experience made the interface feel cluttered and less intuitive.
  • Unclear mental models
    Musicians found features like “Create Gig” confusing when they didn’t identify as organizers.

User feedback

When I spoke with musicians, a few patterns became clear:

  • They wanted a clear, focused experience based on their role
  • They did not naturally think of themselves as “organizers”
  • They expected workflows to match their real-world behavior


Another key insight:

Many bands are managed by a single individual who is not necessarily a performing musician.

This revealed a gap in the system:

  • The platform needed to support group identities, not just individuals
  • Similar to how companies exist alongside individuals on LinkedIn

Iteration — Splitting the system

Based on these insights, I restructured the product into separate experiences:

  • A musician-focused app for discovery, profiles, and interaction
  • An organizer-focused app for creating gigs and managing bookings

 

This change made the system clearer and more intentional. Navigation became simpler, cognitive load was reduced, and each side of the platform felt better aligned with its users’ goals.

While I have not yet completed a full round of testing on this version, the iteration significantly improved the clarity of the product. Features became easier to understand, and the overall experience felt more focused and purpose-driven.

Impact & Validation

Arteve was recognized beyond just a design project.

The product won the Activate Pitch Championship and secured initial funding support from Invest Ottawa, validating both the problem space and the proposed solution.

This was an important milestone — not just as recognition, but as confirmation that the platform addresses a real gap in the creative ecosystem.

More importantly, early conversations with musicians reinforced the core direction:
Arteve is not just another social platform — it’s a system designed to support how artists actually find work and manage their careers.

What’s next

Arteve is still evolving.

The next step is taking it from a validated product direction to a production-ready platform by expanding beyond MVP-level features, rolling it out to a broader user base, and learning from real behavioral data over time.

That shift would move Arteve from insight-driven design to more data-informed product decisions, making future iterations more grounded in how people actually use the platform.

Reflection & Key learnings

One of the biggest lessons from Arteve was how quickly initial assumptions can break down.

What seemed logical through secondary research alone changed once I spoke directly with users and examined real workflows more closely. In some cases, feedback did not just improve the product. It changed its direction entirely and forced me to rethink the platform from the ground up.

This project shifted how I approach product design: from designing features to designing systems, and from validating ideas visually to validating them through real user behavior.

Arteve reinforced something I now see as essential to good product design: it is not about getting it right the first time. It is about continuously aligning the product with how people actually think, work, and make decisions.