Impact Creative Network
Impact Creative Network
In an industry where who you know gets you hired, building a way in for everyone else.
32% sign-up lift · 1 week → 48hr hiring response time · 90% lifecycle retention
The Gates of Hollywood runs on who you know.
Before Impact was a hiring platform, it was a Y Combinator accelerator for writers. The writers' strike froze that business overnight, and with Series A runway burning, we zoomed out.
What we found: the crew side of the industry had almost no online presence.
Hiring was referrals over email and text, no visibility into who was available for new projects. The deeper problem wasn't the missing online presence, it was the relationship layer underneath it.
The pivot to focus on crew moved fast because the bones already existed, database search, lists, profile structures all transferred from writers to crew. The audience changed, the concept didn't.
Neither Side Had A Way In
Coordinators worked off personal Excel sheets and their own phones, asking friends for referrals. Only the people already top of mind got called.
Crew trying to break in joined paid Facebook groups, hired coaches, took hundreds of coffees, and got almost nothing, because the system was structurally closed.
Referrals Were A Safe Bet
Hiring outside the circle always hit the same hesitation: "I'm scared to hire someone new because I don't know how it would reflect on me, and I don't know if they're verified."
The decision wasn't just about filling a role. It was a personal reputation bet made under extreme time pressure.
What That Meant
Being unknown was a bigger barrier than being unqualified. Roles filled in hours, so coordinators called friends first. Getting work required experience, and experience required work, so early-career crew had no way in.
How might we open access to opportunity in an industry where who you know determines who gets hired without disrupting the relationships that make it work?
Building a Network That Showcases Credibility
The instinct was to build a better database. But experienced coordinators weren't struggling to find people, they already had a network that worked. The people left out were everyone outside it.
So the challenge was two-sided: make coordinators' existing relationships visible and faster to act on without disrupting how they hired, and give crew a path to surface competence without an established reputation. A tool that only reinforced existing relationships would just digitize the gatekeeping.
Phase 01
Network + Credibility
Solve cold start. Build a network with real signal, people you've worked with, not just people who exist on a database.
Phase 02
Hiring System
Structure the hiring workflow without replacing it. Evolve existing behavior into something faster and trackable.
Phase 1: Building the Network (2022)
There was no existing place where Hollywood professionals actively networked.
Coordinators couldn't hire outside their circle, not because they didn't want to, but because the system gave them no way to: no visibility into availability, no trust signals for strangers, no time to vet anyone.
Profiles and search gave visibility beyond the personal contact list. Availability status answered the availability problem without phone calls.
To build relevance in the search results, we built a clear hierarchy: mutual connections first, shared credits second, profile and experience third.
Claim Your Profile Page
Our first approach for growth: Pre-populate profiles. For Users to join, They could claim their profile, verify the info, jump into the network. Frictionless on paper.
Only 16% of users signed up.
People didn't know what Impact was, so a cold email from a unknown company felt like spam. The pre-populated credits were wrong, so even curious users hit a wall and bounced because they didn't trust it.
The trust anchor itself was wrong. We shifted from claim your profile to see your network, leading with relationship signals instead of credits: who from your past productions is already here, who you have in common.
Same product, different first impression.
That shift drove a 32% sign-up lift.
Profile Cards
Original results were credit-heavy, not what a coordinator needs to decide whether to reach out.
We shifted emphasis to relationship signals, mutuals, shared collaborators, unions and guilds, network proximity, then went further: filter and card became one connected system. The filter isn't just narrowing the list, it's telling results what you care about.
Messaging shipped alongside connecting, not after it. Connection without communication is a dead end, there's no pull to engage.
Phase 2: From Connecting to Hiring (2022–2023)
Hiring For Productions
The same lesson showed up again here. Coordinators already had a process, calling people, tracking responses in their heads. The fix had to make that process faster, not replace it with something new.
Avail Check let coordinators send availability requests to their entire saved list in one action and track every response in one place. Crew got an email with full context and one click to respond. It didn't make people respond faster, it eliminated the time lost before anyone was contacted.
What broke first
The first version tracked only Available and Not Available, which didn't match how hiring actually works, so we rebuilt it around the real states coordinators already used in their heads: outreach sent, response received, follow-up needed, offer made, confirmed.
Response times dropped from roughly a week to under 48 hours.
Phase 3: On-Set Tools
Getting hired through Impact was only half the job
Once hiring worked, retention told a different story. Users got hired through Impact and then disappeared from it — production was happening off-platform in texts, calls, and separate apps. On-set communication was the gap.
Generating User Growth & Hiring Efficiency
Scenechronize charged $30,000+ per engagement. Impact delivered comparable capabilities at roughly 30% of that cost, and once studios were already using Impact through their coordinators, the enterprise conversation sold itself.
Sign-up lift, from the shift to relationship-first onboarding.
Hiring response time — down from roughly a week.
Of competitor pricing, with better UX.
Lifecycle retention, once on-set tools closed the loop.
Establishing & Scaling The Design System
One source of truth across mobile and web
As the product scaled across three phases and two platforms, I built the design system in Figma on atomic principles — tokens to components to flexible patterns — a shared language between design and engineering that cut implementation back-and-forth and let the team move without losing consistency.
Next Steps & Reflections
Phase order is a product strategy
You can't build a credible hiring tool without a real network. You can't build on-set tools until hiring is actually happening. The sequencing wasn't a roadmap, it was a dependency chain.
This wasn't really a hiring problem.
It was a reputation and workflow problem. People weren't just trying to fill roles, they were trying to protect their reputation while doing it fast. Once we understood that, the product decisions got much clearer, because we were designing around how people actually work instead of trying to replace it.