Designing Medial Premium.
Medial was an India-focused social and professional network for the startup community. Founders, early-career professionals and startup enthusiasts used it to share ideas in topic-based pods, get feedback on early concepts, find cofounders, discover jobs, and connect with mentors and investors. Medial was founded in 2023, and sunset in 2026.
Lead designer
CTO + APM
~ 1 month
Mobile-first
Shipped (2024)
Overview
Medial had no revenue product, and I was brought in specifically to design one after freelancing as a visual designer with Medial for a few months. In a month, working alone on design alongside the cofounder/CTO and an APM, I built a complete subscription system: three tiers, an upsell system woven through the app, and the purchase and upgrade flows behind it.
Medial needed a revenue stream, and the community had to stay welcoming while it paid for itself.
What I Did
Designed a three-tier subscription mapped to user personas, a set of context-aware upsells, and the plan selection, payment and upgrade flows.
The monetisation layer shipped as Medial's first paid product.
Context
Medial was a social platform for the startup world. People came to share ideas in topic-based pods, get feedback on early concepts, find cofounders, post and discover jobs, and follow startup content. A large part of the community was idea and pre-seed stage founders looking for the one thing that was hard to find elsewhere: real access to mentors and investors.
The business had grown its audience without charging for anything. The company now had a revenue target, and I joined to design the answer to it. This was the first monetisation attempt Medial had made, so there was no existing pricing, no existing paywall and no playbook to copy.
The Challenge
How do you charge a community without making it feel gated?
Medial's value came from people showing up and talking to each other. Any paywall that made the product feel closed would damage the very thing we were trying to monetise. At the same time, the business needed revenue, so premium had to be valuable enough to buy and gentle enough not to resent.
Who Would Pay, and Why
Before designing any tier, I grouped Medial's users by what they came for, because that decides what they would pay for.
User Group
What they came for
What they would pay for
Platform users
Making and consuming content
Visibility and profile tools
Founders
Mentors, investors and funding
Trackers, premium content and direct access
Job seekers
Startup roles
Exclusive job listings
Two things made this grouping more than a theory. First, the founder core of the community valued access above everything: a list of active investors with contact details, or a way to reach the right mentor, saved them weeks of cold outreach. Second, Medial had an exclusive jobs list sourced through the company's own connections, which meant roles that were not listed on LinkedIn or Naukri. That is a rare thing to be able to sell.
The audience was also broader than the founder core suggests. Our demographic splits showed more early-career professionals than entrepreneurs, which would matter later when we had to decide what sat at the top of the pricing ladder.
Three Personas, Three Tiers
Rather than stacking features by quantity, I built each tier around a person. Every tier is a strict superset of the one below it, so moving up never means losing something.
Tier
Built for
What it adds
Premium
Platform users who create and consume content
Profile analytics (see who viewed you), boosted comments and replies, your work in your bio, control over who can message you, and the ability to edit posts
Premium Plus
Founders
Everything in Premium, plus premium content (startup breakdowns, models and analyses) and trackers for active Indian VCs, layoffs, incubators and government grants
Premium Jobs
Founders and job seekers
Everything in Premium Plus, plus exclusive job listings and filters by sector, salary and experience
Features moved between tiers many times. What finally settled each decision was the persona I had attached to the tier: if a feature mattered most to that person, it lived there.
Pricing logic. I set the tiers so that the step from the first to the second tier is large, while the step from the second to the third is small. It works like the choice between a small, medium and large popcorn: when medium costs much more than small but large costs only a little more than medium, large starts to look like the obvious value. The top tier is the one I wanted users to feel they were getting the most for their money.
Naming. There are only so many ways to say plus and premium, and the names had to stay distinct at a glance. I named the top tier after the feature I wanted users to see as the biggest value, jobs, so the name itself pointed at what they were getting.
Deep Dive 01: What Belongs at the Top of the Ladder?
The top tier anchors the whole pricing structure, so what it contains matters more than any other packaging choice. The team could not agree on it. There were two real candidates: the trackers or the jobs.
Trackers
Exclusive Jobs
What it is
Lists of active Indian VCs, grants and incubators, with contact details
Roles from Medial's own network, not found on LinkedIn or Naukri
For
Founders
Job seekers, and founders hiring
Case for
Fits Medial's founder identity and speaks directly to the founders at the heart of the community
Harder to find anywhere else, and appeals to the largest part of the audience
Case against
Appeals to a narrower group
Less aligned with the founder brand
The deciding input was our demographic data. Early-career professionals outnumbered entrepreneurs on the platform, and a tier that mostly served founders would have put the biggest value in front of the smaller group. Exclusivity of the jobs list also made it the offer least replaceable by free alternatives, which is what a top tier needs.
We put jobs at the top, named the tier after it, and kept every other feature as a subset beneath it. The trackers stayed in the middle tier, where they matched the founder persona exactly.
Deep Dive 02: Upsells That Appear When They Help
A paywall on every screen would have worked against the community. Instead I designed a system where premium shows up in two ways: it lets people see what they are missing, and it appears only when someone's behaviour shows they would benefit.
Show what is missing, honestly. On Profile Analytics, free users see a slice of the list of people who viewed their profile, with the rest locked behind a Get Medial Premium CTA. The locked rows are real data, only blurred. The reasoning is simple: a curious user who can see that real people viewed them wants to know who. Real data makes the offer honest, and it makes the pull stronger than any placeholder would.
Show up when it is relevant. The most important decision was to trigger some upsells by what a person was writing about. Premium CTAs appeared only on posts containing certain keywords. If someone wrote that they were struggling to reach investors, the post carried a CTA pointing to the VC tracker in Premium Plus. The same thinking shaped the hiring and cofounder-search pods, where an expanded post carries a Premium Jobs prompt. The upsell answered the problem the person had just described, so it read as help, not as an ad.
Knowing where to stop. Not every placement survived. Some promotional CTAs felt pushy once I saw them in context, and I removed them. For the prompt that greets people when they open the app, I explored three ways of placing it above the feed, looking for the version that was least annoying for the person scrolling.
Deep Dive 03: Choosing and Upgrading a Plan
With three tiers and a dozen features, picking a plan could easily have become a research project. The goal was to let someone compare everything in a few seconds and feel confident in their choice.
A swipe comparison, line by line. I made the plan selector a horizontal swipe between tiers, with the same feature rows in the same order on every card. When a user moves from one tier to the next, their eye stays in one place and only the checkmarks change. I compared this with scrolling a long page and with opening a separate card per plan. Swiping gave the least eye movement of the three and felt faster, and because each tier includes everything below it, the line-by-line view makes the upgrade visible: the top tier simply has more rows lit up.
Monthly or annual, in the same place. A toggle sits on the plan screen and shows the saving up front. The user can decide on billing without leaving the screen or meeting a second step.
Upgrading without dead ends. People who already pay need their own path. I designed an Active Plan state so the current tier is clearly marked, and an Upgrade CTA for everything above it. Two rules handled the edge cases: the upgrade tag never appears for users on the top tier, and if someone swipes to the plan they are already on, the screen points them to the next one up. Plans and Billing in Settings shows the current plan, lets the user expand its details and change plans, so managing a subscription happens in one place.
Details That Mattered
Editing posts, and the cost of deleting. On Medial, deleting a post leaves a permanent placeholder on the user's profile saying the post was deleted by the user. That rule existed to deter profile spam. It also meant a user who only wanted to fix a typo paid a visible price for it. I made Edit a premium feature and placed it right where the problem appears: on the delete confirmation, which now reads Edit instead? Edited posts carry an Edited label, and some show the time of the edit, so readers can still trust what they see. A rule that protected the platform became a natural reason to upgrade.
A payment flow built for how people in India pay. UPI comes first, with Google Pay, Paytm and PhonePe one tap away and an option to add a UPI ID, because UPI is how most people in India pay online. During the UPI approval, a countdown keeps the user on the screen and warns them not to close it until the transaction is complete. Every outcome has a screen of its own: cancelled, failed, and successful, each with clear next steps. Where money may have left the account, the screen tells the user a refund will follow within two hours, which takes the biggest anxiety out of a failed payment.
Constraints and Trade-offs
A month and one designer meant choosing where to go deep and where to keep things simple. I spent the exploration time on the decisions that shaped the business, the tier structure and the upsell system, and kept the supporting flows to patterns the team could build quickly.
The real limits shaped the product. Engineering time decided how much custom behaviour each flow could carry. Payment gateway limits on iOS, and the compliance work involved in card payments in India, narrowed what checkout could offer. And I removed upsell placements that felt pushy, even though more placements might have meant more conversions, because the community was the thing worth protecting.
Reflections
I would build the upsell as one component system from day one. Under the deadline it grew screen by screen. A single CTA component with defined variants would have been faster to ship and easier to keep consistent.
Persona-based tiers are easy to explain, but they ask people to place themselves. A user who is both a founder and a job seeker still has to choose. The line-by-line comparison softened that choice, but it did not remove it.
Constraint made me a more efficient designer. One month, one designer and a revenue target taught me which decisions to make quickly and which deserve real exploration. I work very differently now because of it.
Where it Landed
The premium system shipped as Medial's first monetisation layer: three tiers built around real users, upsells designed to help instead of interrupt, and a purchase and upgrade path that handled every outcome. Medial has since sunset, but the thinking behind how to charge a community without closing it off is something I carry into every product I design.
35%
Improved onboarding process
25%
Increase in user retention
84%
Increase in time spent on website
