Role: Principal Designer
Years: 2014 to 2017
Projects
Team
Via: Rocksauce Studios

Dosh

From napkin idea to a $275m acquisition from Cardlytics, Dosh was a project I took personal stake in. Account executive, branding, UX, UI, content, features & even GTM. Dosh was the cash back app that defined a category to hit #1 on the app stores.

Cash back, no coupons

Dosh pays you cash when you shop. You link a card once, buy things the way you always do, and the app moves a share of the merchant's marketing money into your wallet. Rocksauce worked on it from the first concepts in 2014 to the public launch in early 2017 and beyond, covering product definition, UX, brand, UI and development.

Fig. 1: One dashboard, four passes: the 2014 wireframe, the first design, the gradient, then Dosh Purple. Eventually we got rid of the gradient and just landed on using Dosh Purple instead.

Three designs, one set of flows

Over those years my team designed the app at least three times over. That is the story: what stayed fixed (link a card, see offers, watch a balance grow, move the money out) and what we kept changing around it. The serif, the skyline and the orange all went.

Dozens of Dosh screens on phones laid out in rows: the purple dashboard, offers, DoshTravel city cards, onboarding and a doshback ring

Eighteen custom Dosh line icons: a bell, a wallet taking cash, sharing, a dashboard, a car, a receipt, a plane, a calendar, a suitcase, shopping and food, hands holding a heart, a dropped phone, a storefront, a bed, a cocktail, hands holding cash, a card and a price tag

Three onboarding screens: every time you purchase, earn when booking and visiting, Dosh finds you hidden cash

Offers as a list sorted by distance, and the same offers on a map

DoshTravel: hotel results sorted by doshback, the same hotels on a map, and a hotel's details

The merchant side

None of that worked without the surface behind it: the merchant portal, where a business authored the offers that populated the app, and where our team reviewed each one before it went live. The coupon mechanic was the hook; the data it generated was the actual product a skeptical owner was being sold.

The Dosh merchant portal's dashboard, with offers, customers and marketing charts

Create an Offer, with a live preview of the offer as it will look in the app

Launch, and after

Before launch we built a countdown site that took beta sign-ups, and more than 10,000 people registered. Cardlytics announced its acquisition of Dosh on March 1, 2021 for a reported $275 million and completed it on March 9, 2021. Considering the success of the project and where things went, there's not a thing I would change about how we handled things.

10,000+beta sign-ups before launch

$275M, 2021Cardlytics acquisition