From sneakers to startups: designing for the reseller-to-founder generation

Corey (@coreykarthik) once posted a line on X that sums up a whole generation of founders:

I quoted it with three words: “A proper journey.”

It’s funny because it’s true, and it’s also a pretty accurate map of who I design for. Many of my clients come from that world: resellers, bot makers, deal hunters, crypto teams and, eventually, startup founders. Some are still at one stage of the pipeline, others have moved through several. Either way, they bring the habits of that journey with them, and those habits shape what good design looks like for them.

Think about what each step involves. Botting and reselling reward speed and reading a market before everyone else. Collectibles and NFTs are about community, scarcity and knowing who to trust. Crypto adds wallets, charts and the constant risk of getting burned. By the time someone from this world starts a company, they’ve used more dashboards, Discord servers and checkout flows than most product teams.

That makes them a demanding audience, in a good way. They can tell in seconds whether a product was built by people who get it. So when I design for them, five things matter more than anything else: speed, trust, community, dark interfaces done properly, and value you can see straight away.

This audience is used to products where seconds count. That expectation carries over to every site and app they open.

• A headline that says exactly what you do. Bandar’s Bounties is a premium Discord group that helps people find online price errors and exclusive deals. Its hero leads with a direct line about earning from price mistakes, not a vague slogan.
• Key information above the fold. Numbers, status and the next action should be visible without scrolling.
• Fast pages. A beautiful site that loads slowly feels amateur to people who are used to tools where every second counts.
• Mobile first. Much of this audience lives on their phone. On Bandar’s Bounties, every desktop element was optimized for mobile, because around 60% of global web traffic is mobile.

People who have been through reselling and crypto have seen plenty of projects disappear overnight. They arrive skeptical, and they’re right to. Design can’t fake trust, but it can make real proof easy to see.

On Bandar’s Bounties, the hero shows real examples of past wins, and the testimonials section mixes real member stories with highlighted press articles. One brings authenticity, the other credibility, and together they do more than either alone. On Encore, the dashboard includes a changelog for every update, which tells users the product is alive and maintained. Inside a product, a clear license status and a simple renewal flow do the same job.

What I avoid: fake urgency, generic stock photos of money and claims nobody can check. This audience spots them immediately.

Almost everything in this world happens in groups: Discord servers, group chats, timelines. A product for this audience is rarely used alone, so the design should help people show it to others.

• Share cards. For Waveform, I designed a trade share card that turns a result into something worth posting, with the brand’s chrome 3D shapes front and center. Every screenshot becomes a small ad.
• Social proof that feels native. Real names, real stories and real screenshots read as more honest than polished marketing quotes.
• A brand people want to show off. Icons, logos and 3D visuals that look good as a profile picture, a banner or a sticker travel much further than a logo that only works on white.

Most products in this space are dark, and there are good reasons for it. People keep dashboards open for hours, and dark mode reduces eye strain. Charts, prices and status colors also stand out more against a dark background.

But dark is not a style on its own. A dark UI needs more care, not less:

• Contrast for what matters. Wins, losses, balances and errors should jump out. Everything else steps back.
• One strong accent. Encore uses green against black, so you always know where to look and what’s active.
• Layers, not lines. Separate areas with subtle changes in surface tone instead of borders everywhere.
• Readable type. Thin gray text on black looks elegant in a mockup and fails in real use.

Astra shows how far this can go: an AI chat that answers crypto questions with charts, a screen of AI agents, and a portfolio dashboard with a donut chart, price graph and assets table, all in one dark system that stays readable.

This audience has seen every kind of marketing. What works is clarity: what is it, what do I get, and what happens next.

On Bandar’s Bounties, the pricing section uses a toggle between the “wrong choice”, staying where you are, and the “right choice”, picking a plan. The audience is roughly 16 to 35 and looking to make extra cash, so the section frames the decision in their terms instead of listing features. Inside a product, clear value means the core result is the first thing you see: the portfolio value, the queue, the answer to the question you just asked.

If you’re rethinking an existing product along these lines, my SaaS redesign checklist is a good place to start.

The last step in Corey’s pipeline is the interesting one. People who started with bots, resale and Discord groups end up raising money, hiring teams and building startups. Their design needs grow with them: from a landing page and a dashboard to a full brand, a design system and a product that has to scale.

The good news is that the instincts from earlier in the journey still apply. Speed, proof, community and clarity are what make any startup product work. This audience just notices sooner when they’re missing. You can see what that looks like at a bigger scale in the ChromaAI redesign, or browse more case studies.