Roster Card Brand & Social Platform Build
A social network for creatives where your profile is a trading card. Built from zero with a live token economy, a two-way connection system, and an identity that makes networking feel like collecting instead of applying.
What they needed
Roster Card is ours. Style Driven built it, funds it and keeps it free for members.
Every professional network turns a person into a resume, then asks other people to care about it. Nobody collects resumes.
The brief was to build a professional network that doesn't read like a form: make the profile itself the product, worth collecting on sight, and back it with a rewards economy that pays for showing up rather than posturing. The reframe came before any screen got designed. A profile is a card, not a resume. Once that's settled, everything downstream is obvious: connections become a binder, the network becomes The Deck, rewards become a currency.
Scope was a full social product, not a demo. Auth, profiles, portfolios, connections, endorsements, messaging, events, a community board, specialty browsing, the economy, and the admin sitting over all of it.
What we did
How we got there
Roster Card started about a year ago, to bring back what early Instagram got right: a portfolio that's fun to look at, a little MySpace nostalgia, and a way to find creatives without doom scrolling a feed built to hold your attention.
- 01Version one
Same bones, different look
The first version had another identity and another card design. The concept was already there: the profile is a card, the network is a deck, and showing up earns Exposure Bucks.
- 02Version two
Cards worth printing
The rebuild brought the new identity, better cards and a plan to print them for real. A member who gets featured goes holographic, and we send them the printed card. The first 100 members get a First Edition tag.
- 03The hard part
Fun, without the attention trap
The hard part was making a network people want to come back to without building it to farm their attention. Exposure Bucks reward showing up, not scrolling.
What it did
Full social platform shipped from zero: identity, product design, front end, back end, real-time data, and admin.
A working in-app economy, Exposure Bucks, with named faucets and sinks instrumented from day one and an admin dashboard tracking total minted, unique earners, distribution, and which faucets are outrunning the sinks. Tuneable from a live dashboard instead of guessed at.
Five card tiers (Starter, Rising, Select, Holographic, Minted) give the network a visible standing system on launch. Starter through Select are earned. Holographic is granted, never earned, which keeps the top of the ladder scarce.
Twenty-nine filterable specialties, so The Deck is browsable by what people do rather than their job title.
Real-time data throughout on Next.js and Convex: connections, endorsements, messages, and EB balances update live rather than on refresh.
Installable as a mobile web app, with card sharing built for how creatives actually pass a profile around.
Book
the call,
Fifteen minutes on a call, or a note in the inbox. Either way a person reads it and gets back to you.