Q&A: CoinTracker

J.S.

Early on we decided to build around CoinTracker’s core mission—to enable everyone to use crypto with peace of mind. That has been central to CoinTracker since day one. But what we hadn’t figured out yet was the positioning, and how to express that mission through the design of the product and brand. How do we deploy that and make it tangible to users? That was the challenge—to tackle this with design.

B.D.

I stepped into the project when the digital design work started, so a good chunk of brand strategy had already been done by our team mates. It was nice to come in with an excellent understanding of CoinTracker’s personality and who they wanted to be. That fed into our design process and the way we answered a fundamental question: how do we translate CoinTracker’s personality into its digital output?

J.S.

After laying the foundation of the brand strategy, we then very quickly moved to creating and developing visual elements like the logo, word mark, color palette, and so on. With those elements in hand, we could start expressing the brand. It’s very difficult to know if a brand strategy works until it is tested. The more testing we could do on our landing pages and product pages, the better. I love to do this quickly after the brand work, because that’s really where and how you translate the brand strategy into tangible digital products that users will experience.

B.D.

I think it was Jude. You were so good at, “Right, what‘s the next thing?” Honestly, I was so impressed. There were so many balls in the air and you were so good at pulling them all together to keep the project moving in the right direction. The project would have been very different without your ability to align so many people. This was on a weekly basis. I was amazed by how you did that.

J.S.

Right back at you. The BB team was so seamless, easy and fun to work with. It makes that cadence doable because you have to like seeing that person at 8:00 in the morning every day for three months, right?

One thing that I appreciated was the modular approach. I don’t know if you remember this, Beth, but there was this meeting where you said, “Currently, there are 28 unique website pages. Option A keeps them as separate, individually designed pages. Or we go with Option B, which means we group them into 8 page types using reusable modules, making components more flexible and significantly reducing development time.”

B.D.

I was thinking, maybe don’t pick Option A.

J.S.

I know! I was like, “Bless your heart,” as they say. If we had done option A, we would still be working on those pages now.

B.D.

I remember some midweek meetings where it ended up just being all women, and at the time, I thought, “I love this. This never happens within the product world.” From my experience, it is really rare, especially when we’re working more in that product domain. We expect to work, generally speaking, with male developers, but having that whole product team with all of us women was lovely and very unusual.

J.S.

I don’t know if it was by design; it just worked out that way. Everyone was very highly skilled with high capacity, high output, high empathy, but, most importantly, low egos. It has to do with everyone realizing, “It’s a really big project, but hey, we’ve got to pitch in here”, and we just happened to be all women. When I have found myself on teams like that, I appreciate it so much. Everyone is very mission-oriented, efficient, respectful—and fun.

J.S.

When CoinTracker first launched, it was the only tax product, so it was what we call a ‘blue ocean’ business—wide open. Around 2021, a particular Web3 aesthetic started to emerge. There was this kind of dark mode and this “casino” aesthetic that came to the forefront. We wanted to be a brand apart from that vibe, to be a bit more refined. There’s a lot of value in showcasing that we are a trusted partner in the crypto space.

B.D.

Related to that: how did you find the process of incorporating illustration? It is a core part of what the brand became and how people perceive it. In my experience it can be an abstract and sometimes daunting experience for brands to choose their illustration style. How did you find that process?

J.S.

When we were leaning into the illustration style, I remember seeing the work of Ibraham (Rayintakath) and thinking: it’s painterly, it’s textural and it feels handmade. Of course, he uses digital tools and we live in this hybrid world—but something about it felt both futuristic and organic. And I liked that because we’re a tax product, which can feel sterile, analytical and cold. This might sound counter-intuitive, but I didn’t want hand-drawn illustrations of spreadsheets, clocks and pencils. I wanted people to feel good, and have peace of mind while doing their taxes. We should have released a Spotify playlist that you listen to while doing your taxes - that would have been next level :-).

J.S.

Our landing page has been performing really well. I’ve been looking at those metrics and watching them to ensure we don’t hit any guardrails or precipitous drops. We haven’t. It’s been performing strongly when compared to previous years. Also, you have trolls on X who typically will talk about a new brand drop and have their opinions about it, and we haven‘t had any. People have been positive, saying that the UI looks great compared to last year. I think there was a Gen Z quote: “Hey, CoinTracker’s low-key looking nice,” which is the highest compliment!

B.D.

That's a solid pull quote. We should just put that everywhere.

J.S.

Haha yes, we should remove the CoinTracker logo at the footer and just feature that quote.

J.S.

We kicked off around the 4th of July and were working with marketing by August. That’s incredibly fast. That’s what I'm most proud of. We just kept the train moving and kept going to land by tax season. For the first time, we also had enough creative DNA to fuel our very first brand marketing campaign. Millions of dollars were invested into this brand marketing campaign for tax season. So, our creative work had a real fiscal financial impact. I thought, “If you’re going to spend this money, why not display the very best?”

B.D.

I found it such a frictionless process, and I’ve never had it a website design process go that easily. The way we worked in sprints meant one process led into the next, and it just... worked. There were no points where I was like, “This is a nightmare.” I just had this sense the whole time that it was going well, and at the same time, that we were really achieving something as a team. That was nice.

J.S.

“This isn't a nightmare.” That could be a great headline for this article.

B.D.

Imagine if we had decided to design those 28 pages.

J.S.

We would definitely still be designing them.