Overview
FirstPromoter is affiliate, influencer and referral software for SaaS and subscription businesses. From 2022 to 2025 I redesigned the product end to end for FirstPromoter 2.0, built its design system and dark theme, and designed its marketing material.
Design process
- discover: Stakeholder call
- discover: Research
- define: Moodboard
- define: Ideation
- design: Design & prototyping
- design: Feedback
- deliver: Refine
- deliver: Handoff
The problem & solution
FirstPromoter worked, but it looked dated, buried its key numbers in dense screens, and left new customers to set up their program on their own.
- Dated colours and a flat type hierarchy made data-heavy screens hard to scan and the product feel less trustworthy.
- Onboarding and campaign setup had no guided flow.
- Affiliate dashboards were customised through a stack of raw text editors.
- With no design system, screens drifted apart and a dark theme was out of reach.
- Neither admins nor affiliates had a mobile layout.
- A clear type scale and hierarchy: key figures and pending actions first, details below.
- One onboarding flow with campaign setup built in: connect billing, integrate the site, test.
- A visual dashboard editor: logo, brand colours and layout with a live preview.
- A design system on Figma variables that mirror the code tokens, with light and dark themes.
- Mobile layouts for both the admin and the affiliate dashboard.
The dashboard opens on what needs doing.
A program owner opens the dashboard with two questions: how is the program doing, and what is waiting on me? Four headline figures now lead the page, and pending promoters, referrals, rewards and overdue payouts are pulled onto it, each one click from the list behind it.
Brand the affiliate dashboard by sight, not by markup.
Customising the affiliate dashboard used to mean editing raw text fields full of template tags. The new editor groups the settings into Brand, Header and Layout, uses swatches and uploads instead of code, and shows every change in a live preview beside it.
Onboarding that ends with a working program.
Connecting billing, integrating the website and creating the first campaign used to be separate jobs. The new onboarding takes them in order, with campaign setup inside the flow, and each step shows plainly whether it is connected yet.
New features, built from the same system.
As the product grew, new features came in on the same components and variables: an assets library for sharing creatives with affiliates, contests with a live leaderboard, reports, custom email templates, team roles and an integrations hub.
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