Arteve - Platform Design
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 – Present
Scope: End-to-end product design
TL;DR
The gap: Musicians find gigs through Instagram, word-of-mouth, and scattered tools — unreliable and time-consuming. Organizers face the opposite problem: too many options, too little clarity.
What I did: Researched both sides, designed a structured discovery-to-booking system, then restructured the entire product after user feedback broke my original assumption.
Outcome: Won the Activate Pitch Championship and secured early funding support from Invest Ottawa.
Understanding both sides of the market
I studied three user groups — professional musicians, emerging artists, and event organizers — focusing on how they actually discover opportunities, communicate, and manage bookings, not just what they say they do.
Three patterns drove every design decision that followed.
1. Discovery is broken on both sides. Musicians depend on Instagram and personal networks, so opportunities go to whoever’s already connected — not whoever’s the best fit. Organizers get the reverse: scattered referrals and incomplete profiles with no reliable way to compare talent.
2. Self-promotion eats the time musicians should spend on their craft. The more effort spent chasing gigs across platforms, the less spent actually improving as an artist.
3. Nothing supports the whole journey. Existing tools solve one slice — networking or one-off gig discovery. Booking, communication, and long-term visibility stay fragmented across DMs, email, and calls, where details get lost.
The Problem
How might we create one structured platform where musicians can consistently discover opportunities and build credibility — while organizers can find and evaluate talent 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: Profiles showcase real credibility; organizers search and filter by actual need; opportunities are visible and actionable.
2. Reduce friction in booking and communication: Messaging, booking, and coordination live in one place — no more switching between Instagram, email, and calls.
3. Support long-term career growth, not just one-time gigs: Ongoing visibility and repeat opportunities, so a musician’s profile grows with them over time.
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.
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.
Why it matters:
Bits complements discovery by helping talent stay top of mind between opportunities.
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, and 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.
To test the restructure quickly, I used AI tools to generate interactive prototypes of both new experiences — a musician-focused app and an organizer-focused app — rather than rebuilding everything by hand. This let me see and feel the split direction almost immediately, instead of spending days on mockups before knowing whether it worked
From Design to Implementation
From Prototype to a Working MVP
With the split prototypes validating the direction, I moved from design into building. Using ChatGPT and Claude for AI-assisted coding, I turned the prototypes into two functioning applications — quickly enough to get a real, usable MVP in front of people rather than stopping at screens.
Working in a live environment let me:
- Validate design decisions in a real product, not just a prototype
- Surface edge cases and usability gaps that static designs hide
- Iterate faster, grounded in how the product actually behaved
The result is two focused, live experiences:
Musician app → arteve.in
Organizer app → organizer.arteve.in
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.
More Projects
