Targeting the hobby developer market

Hobby developers are not paying enterprise customers. But they can eventually be in the future. This was the bet on which PlanetScale decided to rebrand itself in late 2020, targeting indie developers and hobbyists.

Part of that effort was to reimagine the login and onboarding workflow for PlanetScale’s dashboard. The goal was to remove as much friction as possible for a hobby developer to get started with a free PlanetScale database, while leaning into the brand’s minimalist, and edgy aesthetic.

This was a hugely successful effort and part of the initiative to rebrand PlanetScale, targeting indie developers, which ultimately led to a $50M Series C round led by Kleiner Perkins in November of 2021.

Artifacts

Visual assets

I did a series of illustrations to aid the workflows.