# Beans

> Retention for ecommerce, against Yotpo, Smile.io and LoyaltyLion. I joined as the first designer and stayed six years.

Source: https://ralphsena.com/projects/beans

*from 2019 · First product designer · Product design, SaaS, Ecommerce*

Live at [trybeans.com](https://trybeans.com)

## Joining early

I joined at an early stage as the first product designer, in a market already crowded with Yotpo, Smile.io and LoyaltyLion.

## Expanding

I helped grow it from a Shopify loyalty plugin into a platform: referrals, notification widgets, social login, automated emails, smart popups. The aim was one place a merchant could run retention from.

## Then cutting back

It was becoming a jack of all trades and drifting from what made it good in the first place, which was simplicity. I argued for shutting features down and rebuilt the key flows around being genuinely simple rather than nominally complete.

## Scaling and leading

Later the work turned to enterprise customers, holding on to that simplicity while building for higher-ticket accounts. I led two junior designers and built the onboarding that brought them up to speed.

Back to [all projects](https://ralphsena.com/projects.md).