Tiperosity

A tip-sharing community for smarter living. 

Brand

At Tiperosity, we believe in generously sharing knowledge. Be free with what you know and share it widely. Everyone knows something worth sharing. Our founder puts it this way:

We’ve all learned things  —  through blind luck, trial-and-error, or hard work  —  that has made our life better. Something that saved time, saved money, or maybe even saved a marriage. Wouldn’t it be great if someone else could benefit from your insight? And vice versa  —  who wouldn’t want to benefit from someone else’s brilliance?

From travel and wellness, to work and relationships, we set out to create a brand for the everyday know-how for your every day. Designed to be simple and practical, social and useful, there’s a softness to the aesthetic. It’s friendly and approachable with a uniform execution for a family of commonly understood visuals. What tied it all together was the upward share symbol we consistently used to represent a tip.

The branding included a full set of iconography as well as a consistent photo treatment used on social media and in the design of the platform. For any scrappy startup with a tiny budget, you have to make do with what you have. For photography, we knew we were limited to royalty-free stock, whether low or no cost. Colorizing the imagery in our bright palette helped give each photo a unique twist. For the typography, we went with an academic-esque font (Lexia) for headlines and friendly sans-serif (Effra) for body copy. 

Once the branding was set, we had the basic building blocks for our social media presence. Then we were ready to take on the main component of this tip-sharing idea — the platform. 

Platform

With the Tiperosity platform, the hope was that it would become a community. A place for helpful, caring people to share what they know to help make everyday life a little bit better. It’s a huge task to create an online community that often needs a big team and healthy financial resources. Ultimately, we just wanted to make something we could be proud of. Something that felt fresh and interesting. Here’s where we ended up.

We started with a library of over 50,000 tips. They came from a similar project created by our founder called Daytipper in the early 2000s. Looking at all the content we had, we determined that categories and tags would be important for discovery. The UI was designed to be a simple feed that clearly presented each tip with its corresponding tags. Aside from prompting visitors to share the tips, we asked people to let the community know if a tip was helpful. 

The process for platform design and development was iterative and phased. The team, having worked in the startup tech space for many years, knew where we wanted to take the initial build. After that, we used milestones to inform where to go next. We launched with a fairly light feature set. The intention was to get the idea out there and see the response. Mostly from friends and family, but also site visitors in general, we collected feedback on how to evolve the platform.

In the months following the launch, we slowly and deliberately added features from the product roadmap. The most important of those features was the Tip List. A curated collection of tips under a focused topic — how to brew the best coffee, leadership truths, planning vacations, etc. In the beginning, a lot of the lists were best-ofs and seasonal collections from the tips we already had. But as time went on we were able to use the feature to recruit new writers to the site.

Tip List authors who joined the site were experts on a wide variety of topics. Some really great lists shared tips about pairing wine and food, canning vegetables, being a great Airbnb traveller, and how to brew the best cup of coffee. The list on 6 Principles & Practices of Authentic Conversation was particular good.

The second important feature added to the community was User Accounts. A big lift for the dev team that allowed people who signed up to save helpful tips, add new tips, and become list authors. Users just needed to input a name, email, and password. Once an account was created, basic profile info could then be added.

Now with a fairly comprehensive set of features for what we consider to be an online community, we continued to push basic dev updates and monitor use. We slowly streamed in tips from our vast archive and pulled in new tips, mostly from Tip List authors. 

At its core, the platform was meant to be simple. We allowed for discovery with feed callouts and a condensed side column of features — popular lists, tags, and categories. The following is an overview of the platform in action.

Social

Along the way, you could always follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and read a few of our stories on Medium. The main goal was always to push people to the platform to browse our growing collection tips. But our Twitter strategy did prove to be a force all its own. 

The tone for Tiperosity was casual and a little quirky. The brand writing for each category was approached like an ad headline. The tone was then carried over into social media posts. 

On Twitter, our strategy was to create an account for each category. We called those “tiperos” and we pushed out all tips based on categories. A tip on the platform could be longer than the standard 140 characters but not by much. Because of length and its word-centric nature, a tip existed on Twitter very well. We did monitor the accounts but most of the activity push was automated. This approach got us up to more than 42,000 followers across all accounts.  

Facebook was a challenge. We did run ads and boost posts here and there but didn’t see the success we did on Twitter. We also spent a little time on Medium where we’d write about core ideas. A couple of those stories follow.

Where Tiperosity goes next is an open question. We all feel we’ve built an interesting idea and could see the platform taking on a life all its own. Time will tell. Until the next big update, there are plenty of tips to discover, and if you’re so inclined, feel free to share what you know. 

The Team at Tiperosity
Nathan Preheim: Founder
Justin Kemerling: Design
Katie Kemerling: Copywriting
Marie & Patrick Garmoe: Marketing
Human Shapes: Development

2015–2017: Startup, Design Direction, Brand, Web, UI/UX

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