/ WORK / 12 – NOD
CASE / 023 · Mobile · Brand · Research
A referral app for Korea where a real person stands behind every intro. Seekers reach people worth meeting only when a reviewer who knows them says yes.
Unbland designs, builds, and operates custom digital products for media and sports platforms in 20+ verticals. Consider starting your own project similar to this one.
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§ 01
Hiring runs on referrals, but the channels built for them are flooded. Cold applicants get hired at 2.7% against 28.5% for referred ones, while platforms field 11,000 applications a minute. Six products tried to fix warm intros and died, from SixDegrees to Lunchclub and Shapr. The brief began as a crypto game that paid for connections. We chose Korea first on purpose: only 11% of Koreans use LinkedIn, and paying to meet an insider is already normal. NOD competes with recruiter fees, not ads.
§ 02
| L1 · Research | Studied the market, six failed competitors and three personas, turning each product's failure into a design rule. Four versions of the concept got simpler each round, from crypto to trust points. | Market data, competitor teardown, Mobbin | Personas, product rules, MVP 1 scope |
| L2 · UX | Mapped one intro end to end, stranger to meeting in three days, then built 118 black and white wireframes before any colour. Sixteen patterns from shipped apps were mapped to specific screens. | Figma, Mobbin | 118 wireframes, 15 flows |
| L3 · Brand & UI | SixplaySNS became NOD, named after the gesture, with an O that drops into place when someone says yes. Platypi type, a navy and ice palette, and 29 boards of rules carried the wireframes into final UI. | Figma, Platypi | Identity, design system, 124 screens |
§ 03
MVP 1 covers the whole chain on day one: verified sign-up, an ask to reach someone, staking trust points instead of cash, a reviewer passing it on, a yes that opens chat, automatic refunds on a no, and a simple admin panel. Every state was designed, including failures. The brand line became the push notification word for word. Payments in escrow, feeds and advanced trust scoring wait for later, and the next MVP applies the same chain to robots and inspectors.