fortuna
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Case Study — 2022
We built a swipe-to-work app in Miami. I worked on
and everything in between.
It's the project I think about first when I talk about my work.
The job search is clunky
Many pots on the stove
I came on as a design engineer, but knew from the interviews that I'd be wearing a handful of hats.
I worked on the design of Fortuna from early 2022 to Fall 2022. I initially collaborated with another product designer before taking ownership of product design across the Job Seeker and Employer experience.
I worked alongside a small group of software engineers, a content strategist, and a product manager who doubled as our co-CEO. Like many early-stagers, roles bent and blurred. We all stepped outside our job description to keep the product moving.
Fortuna launched in Miami in summer 2022.
Color
The duality of app
The Fortuna ecosystem is home to two species: Job Seeker, Employer. That creates a problem though: There'd be two different sets of people using the same app for two different purposes.
The app couldn't be two apps. Our challenge was making two paths feel like one product.
Our high level goals for the app were to:
Drive the cost of every interaction toward zero.
Automate the work so every tap is reserved for a decision.
Keep the experience on one distraction-free path.
Give users speed as a product; job post to hire in hours, not weeks.
Type
Running on a Hamster Wheel in a Rat Race
I partnered with our other product designer Yvonne to explore how Job Seekers go about applying for work. We spoke to 7 Job Seekers based in Miami and drew up Sarah, a persona based on our collection of insights.
Sarah didn't think the job applications were horrid. They just assumed she had time to search. She didn't.
REFRAMING THE PROBLEM
How might we
Job Seekers were vexed with the apply ➡️ wait ➡️ hear nothing ➡️ apply again hamster wheel.
We framed our How Might We to be: How might we look for work when we have no time to look?
The answer started with making applications cost next to nothing.
Micro-interaction 01
Tinder's spine
Job applications are full of small costs: Read a job post, hit apply, rerouted to another site, fill out another form. Individually these costs are trivial, but together it's enough to spur a Job Seeker from submitting an application.
Fortuna had to cost one gesture instead of several. Swiping already had a familiar mental model, so we hinged the flow on it.
Swipe right to apply, and swipe left to dismiss.
Micro-interaction 02
Issue with swiping
The first prototype exposed a couple flaws.
A gesture built for judging faces needs guardrails when it's judging rent money.
Testers swiped, watched the card disappear, and paused. Had they applied? Dismissed it? Jakob's law meant that the gesture felt natural to them, but it's outcome wasn't obvious.
The product
Wait, come back
Testers swiped through listings so fast that they wouldn’t realize they skimmed past a potentially interesting job until it was too late.
We’d spent weeks stripping friction out of Fortuna, but that made it easy to get lost in the sauce of the swipe, so to speak.
Driving the cost towards zero cheapened the interaction.
The psychological delta between a thirty minute application process and a one second swipe was large enough to stop users from caring.
My friend Athena brought up Chesterson’s Fence, which says you shouldn’t tear down a fence or tradition without understanding why it was put there in the first place.
Was there a reason that fence was up?
We removed the friction fence because it drove the interaction cost up. Some of that friction had been quietly doing a job. It pushed people to pause long enough to make deliberate decisions.
Driving interaction cost toward zero had also lowered the cost of deciding.
The product
The video resume
Free applications create the employer's problem: who are all these people?
Fortuna's answer was a short video resume, recorded in-app after a match. For service jobs, that's higher-signal than paper — the manager is hiring presence, warmth, how you talk to people. A nineteen-year-old can produce it in ninety seconds.
Signal moved to where the hiring criteria actually live.
The prototype
The TestFlight build
Before the stores, there was TestFlight — the working build on our own phones.
It ran the swiping interaction against fake job listings. Placeholder businesses, invented wages, real gesture. Enough to feel the product in your thumb and show it to anyone who'd look.
I used to open it just to show friends. There was a quiet thrill in a thing I'd made living on my phone — even if not yet on theirs. (Years later, my phone asked if I wanted to delete it. That was the last of Fortuna I had.)
The listing
The App Store screens
A store listing is a five-second pitch to a stranger. I worked on ours.
The screenshots had to do what the website does — teach the product without words. Swipe, match, video resume, hired: the whole loop as a scroll of frames, in brand color, in brand type.
The campaign
The shoot: four stories, one winner
For the launch campaign, the founder brought in a professional videographer. I drafted four spot concepts.
Just Like That — Fortuna boiled down to its gesture: swipe, the screen flips, you're somewhere new, working. Do It All — a summer planned around flexible work. All Paths Lead to Fortuna — every swipe as a branching timeline. Break Free from the Rat Race — applications into the void, broken by one swipe.
Just Like That won, for the same reason the product works: the swipe is the story.
"Struggling to find work?"
The swipe
The job try-ons
The bakery match
The fist pump
The logo resolve
Images — The ad band. Drop in a strip of stills from the spot, in story order.
On set
Directing the frame
The spot follows a guy who can't find work. He swipes, and tries on each life — barber, sushi counter, bartender, bakery — until he matches. Fist in the air.
My fingerprints are on three layers. The technique: cinéma-vérité movement and blurred backgrounds, so it reads as a person in your feed, not an ad. The look: wardrobe and props steered toward the Fortuna palette, jobs and casting matched to Miami's actual young service workforce. The edit: sitting in review with the founder and our videographer, where the notes get as granular as film is — make the notification audible, hold the register shot a quarter-second longer, fix the white text vanishing into a white bag.
Frame-level notes are where "brand direction" stops being a mood board and becomes a job.
Growth
Door to door
A swipe app with nothing to swipe is a dead app. Our fake TestFlight listings had to become real ones.
So we seeded the marketplace on foot. I built the target list and we walked Miami — bakeries, barbershops, restaurants — signing up real businesses so the first users would find real jobs in their actual neighborhood.
It felt nothing like product design. It was also the point: the businesses we signed became the jobs in the app and the locations in the ads. The marketplace and the marketing were the same footwork.
Growth
The unglamorous internet
Two more hats, worn simultaneously.
I wrote a stack of SEO posts that were just the searches people make — "How hard is it to get a decent job in Miami?" — each an honest answer that ends at Fortuna. And I priced Instagram accounts to advertise through: a 190K-follower account at $2,999 I flagged as worth it, cheap low-quality pages I flagged as not.
Not literature. Infrastructure.
Live
Launch
Fortuna went live in Miami, on both stores.
Real businesses, real listings, real swipes. The thing I'd shown friends on TestFlight was now something a stranger could download.
The weather inside
What a startup actually felt like
Fortuna moved fast and a little chaotically. I want to be honest about that, because it's the most useful thing I learned.
Objectives wrapped within the week. Everything routed through the founder. And people cycled through constantly — on, good work, gone — until the churn was just the weather. I was kept, and told my work was the bar, while people I liked weren't.
Being valued in a place that precarious is a strange thing to hold.
I learned to keep my footing when the ground won't stop moving.
The end
How it ended
Then it came apart. The founders fell out, the company got tangled in legal trouble, and everything froze.
The app's gone now. The lesson isn't. I'm someone who wants more time to make the thing beautiful, and Fortuna almost never gave it to me — the MVP had to ship before it was as polished as I wanted. I learned, against my own grain, to find the meat of the matter, ship it, and let the polish come later.
That fight between my eye and the clock is one I'll have my whole career. Fortuna is where I learned to lose it on purpose.
I'm proud of something that didn't survive.
It took me a while to be okay with both halves of that sentence. But the work was real, I loved making it, and I'd do it again.
I still wish, a little, that the thing had won.