Tom / Work / Stashrun

Stashrun

A viral donation game. One $5 stash multiplies across a network of friends, turning small acts of generosity into real impact at scale.

Role
Founding Lead Designer

Period
2025 → now

Trees planted
50,000,000

Stashrun terminal — Let's play a game

Retro terminal onboarding animation I designed to entice new users

/01 The product

A giving relay that goes viral.

Stashrun is a charity fundraising platform with 2 core products. The first is brand-led. We partner with big charities and brands and enable them to skyrocket the longevity and reach of campaigns that would otherwise be one-off, time limited affairs with minimal engagement. The second is a user-led product, built around a single mechanic: you stash $5 for a cause, then invite 5 friends. Each of them invites 5 more. Each $1 you contribute gives one friend a free play. The donation multiplies, not through ads or algorithms, (or celebrities/big brands like the other product) but community focused, peer-to-peer generosity.

To enable viral growth, the product lives in a browser, no app install required. Games are run by charities and brands who want to activate their audience while amplifying their impact.

Onboarding explainer animation
animated by me

$5

You start a run for St Baldrick's

Level 1 · 1 stasher

$145

5 friends join. Each invites 5 more.

Level 2 · 5 stashers

$14.5k

The relay keeps passing the torch

Level 3 · 286 stashers

$100.5k

Level 7+ — one $5 did this

Level 7 · 842 stashers

/02 My role

Founding designer. Brand, system, launch.

I joined as the founding lead designer when the old brand-led product was working but unpolished. No design system. No brand language. A positioning problem that made people bounce before they understood what they were looking at.

I guided the brand and visual aesthetic away from pop art cartoony style, towards something sleeker. I built a new design system from scratch, and led design through an international launch. I also wrote the tickets, reviewed production builds on real devices, and prototyped motion-heavy interactions before engineers touched them. No handoff. Just the work.

Brand identity and visual language
Design system — type, colour, motion, iconography
Core product flows — onboarding, game, invite, post-game
Launch campaign design with Global Citizen
C2C greenfield product (ongoing)

Stashrun landing — Play it forward

Beyond product design, I designed the GTM and business development materials: pitch decks, promotional materials and campaign assets that helped define the brand's visual language alongside the product itself.

Example design deck · hover to peek

/03 The terminal

Onboarding that felt like booting up a game.

The biggest design challenge was explaining the mechanic without explaining it. Most donation products lead with earnest copy and charity imagery. We did the opposite: a retro CRT terminal that types out "LET'S PLAY A GAME. A GIVING GAME." before you've seen a single charity logo.

The terminal set the tone for everything: this is playful, this is different, and the giving part is the point, not the branding. It also solved the comprehension problem. Users understood what they were doing before they committed any money, because they'd been entertained by the time the stash screen appeared.

Stashrun coin tap game

Stashrun terminal onboarding

Terminal onboarding — start a run

5 invites — UNICEF run

/04 The invite loop

The design job was making the relay feel inevitable.

The core mechanic only works if people actually invite friends. The design task was to make that feel natural, not transactional. The post-game reveal shows you what your $5 became, then shows you what it could become with 5 friends. The numbers do the persuading and the design reels people in.

The invite flow used a 24-hour timer, friends had to open and stash in time. That urgency was a product decision to help ensure sharing happened while people were still emotionally tied to the cause, the countdown was always visible, always ticking, never nagging.

Run started with John's $5

$5 became 5 plays for friends

Each new player passed it on

Now it's up to you — $100.5k

Choose how many friends to invite

/05 The launch

50 million trees. Global Citizen, J.Lo, Sabrina Elba, Re:Wild.

The international launch was a partnership with Global Citizen, a campaign to plant and protect trees in the Amazon with Re:Wild, SoundFuture, and talent including Jennifer Lopez and Sabrina Elba as part of Global Citizen's NOW: AMAZONIA festival placed in step with COP 2025 in Brazil. This was both the product's first real test and its biggest moment.

Along with the founders, I led the design for the launch: the campaign-facing product surfaces, the charity dashboard, and the promotional assets. The product had to hold up under a celebrity-backed spotlight. In spite of load issues and a few small technical hangups due to the immense immediate demand, people loved it and we planted ~50 Million trees!

Global Citizen Re:Wild Jennifer Lopez Sabrina Elba SoundFuture UNICEF St Baldrick's Foundation Every.org

Key engagement metrics · Global Citizen launch

27%

Share rate

8–13× higher than the 2–3% industry benchmark

3.7

Virality · K-factor

Good K-factor is >1 · great is 1.5–2

~86%

Completion rate

Exceptionally strong follow-through once users enter the flow

~1.8min

Average dwell time

36× to 108× higher than typical 1–3 second paid media benchmarks

>75%

Repeat participation

Sustained re-engagement across sessions

Power-user behaviour

When uncapped, users played hundreds of times consecutively over hours — demonstrating the core engagement loop was genuinely compelling

Distribution dynamics

WhatsApp ranked as the top distribution channel, reinforcing the product's strength in high-trust, small-group peer-to-peer sharing

/06 Outcomes

The numbers and what comes next.

50M

Trees planted at international launch

2

PRODUCTS,2 DIFFERENT GTMS

1

Design system, built from zero

5+

Major charity and brand partners

I'm now leading the design of a greenfield C2C product on top of this foundation, the peer-to-peer giving layer that lets users create and run their own giving games. The design system is being rebuilt for it, moving towards the sleeker design language I've been crafting across product and brand.

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