Technology tells you what it can do. Culture tells you why it matters.

When Effect House came to France, the story of AR had already been written by the tech giants who got there first. It was either a complex utility for engineers, or a three-second filter for a selfie. It had virality. It had utility. It had no prestige.

Meanwhile a generation of young artists was watching, and wanted none of it. They did not need another digital toy. They were looking for a canvas: a medium that respected their ambition.

So the problem was never distribution. It was cultural:

How do you elevate AR from a technical feature into a cultural medium?

Beta-test research showed a low adoption rate, so I uncover target user needs through my in-depth user interviews: monetisation opportunities and connect with the billion-user community of TikTok.

The original message described the product. The new one described what the product was for.

New technologies are adopted through expression, not understanding.

People do not engage with a tool by learning what it does. They engage by using it to say something about who they are.

So the question stopped being how to teach AR, and became: what would make a young design student pick it up not as a software exercise, but as an artistic statement?

The answer wasn't a tutorial. It was a stage.

A stage needs three things: a reason to create, the right audience, and a space that gives the work meaning.

The reason

A creative contest

An open contest inviting creators to reinterpret the heritage of the Grand Palais in AR, turning a technical exercise into a creative statement.

The audience

Target the right audience

Off existing AR creators, tech communities and mature designers. Onto art and design schools, aspiring creators and young designers.

The space

Inside Grand Palais

Selected works exhibited inside the Grand Palais, placing AR where it could be seen, shared and taken seriously. Creators didn't just show work. They met, and became a scene.

They didn't talk about features. They talked about culture.

What started as a product launch became a cultural moment. The French press covered it as an event about technology and culture rather than a feature release, and one of the contest prizes was awarded for the effect most beneficial to culture. Three thousand people came to the Grand Palais, at an acquisition cost well below what paid channels would have charged for the same attention.

The programme also seeded a creator ecosystem that kept running after it closed: over a thousand new effects a month, four in five of them originating here, and a twenty percent increase in monetisation opportunities, which was the thing the designers had said they wanted in the first place.

Creator effects made for the contest and after it, unprompted and unpaid.

TikTok wanted to hold its position as the music platform of choice, and the way to get there was more music content being made on the platform. But engagement with music content was low on both counts that mattered: how long people stayed, and how much they made.

At the same time the label partners had their own problem. Artist growth was hard, and the formats available to them were not solving it.

So the question was not how to promote music better. It was: where is the new growth opportunity for music on TikTok?

Music on TikTok serves two audiences: artists who create content and users who engage with it. I conducted user research and developed personas for both to understand their different needs.

I then mapped their user journeys and found a clear drop in engagement during music livestreams, where engagement should have been highest. Previous attempts to improve other touchpoints hadn't worked, suggesting we needed to rethink the experience rather than keep optimising individual features.

The problem was the format, not the promotion.

Livestreaming is time-sensitive and crowded. It asks everyone to show up at the same moment, it competes with everything else happening at that moment, and when it ends there is nothing left to return to. For an artist trying to build a fanbase over time, that is the wrong container.

So rather than promote the format harder, I designed a new one.

A landing-page driven music hub, built around two properties the livestream did not have.

Reusable

Not time-sensitive

Landing-page based rather than live, so it stays up, stays findable, and can be templated for the next artist instead of rebuilt.

Engaging

A reason to engage

Missions that turn watching into making, with points and a lucky draw that bring people back rather than letting them bounce after one track. Making was the behaviour the brief existed to move.

A campaign ends. A format keeps running across markets.

As churn rose on our $50M ARR product, we needed to take action. I combined user interviews with usage data to understand what customers actually valued, and found that the most active users were not always the decision-makers, and their requests did not always reflect their real needs. This helped me identify the key feature customers consistently returned to, and use it as the foundation for our new pricing model.

200

Quantitative responses analysed

20

User interviews

We found that two of the main reasons users were leaving came down to the product itself. I worked with engineering to improve the matching algorithm and simplify onboarding through A/B testing, helping users see the product’s value sooner. These changes tripled matching accuracy and increased onboarding completion by 24%. We prioritised these improvements before launching the new pricing plans.

The old pricing model didn’t reflect how customers used the product. Smaller customers paid for capacity they didn’t need, while larger ones got far more value for the same price. I introduced usage-based pricing and restructured the plans into six tiers based on customer needs. Each plan offered clear value, with a straightforward upgrade path as customers grew.

Free-to-paid conversion.

Based on my project planning, I set up a sync-up cadence with the cross-functional teams before, during and after the launch.

One headline, one subhead, one button, written for a reader who did not exist: the average of three very different people. A page like that is not badly written. It is written for a composite, and a composite never signs up.

Before. A mission statement: what the company wants to do to the industry.

After. A product promise: what you can do, and the button that does it.

Three pages, three different first verbs. Everyday users are told they can swap, liquidity providers that they can earn, developers that they can build. The same protocol underneath, three different reasons to care, and three separate pages rather than three paragraphs on one.

Positioning that stays in a deck is a point of view. Positioning that ships is a decision, because a live page has to choose who it is talking to.

Everyday users · Swap

Liquidity providers · Earn

Developers · Build