Lauryn Kinsella

Boosting community growth with an internal messaging tool

ROLE

Product Design Intern

TIMELINE

Summer 2025

3 week project

TEAM

1 Developer

SKILLS

0 → 1 Product Design

Info Architecture

OUTCOMES

Driving higher engagement within a community of 3.1K attendees

Verci is a creative community hub or “third space” in NYC that started the Creative Coworking Club!

Saved 6 hours per week on outreach efforts

Shipped customized messaging tool for automating and personalizing outreach efforts.

Me leading a Creative Coworking Club session!

CONTEXT

Creative community for the burnt out 9-5 worker

People were tired of working alone while surrounded by millions of other creatives in NYC.

Verci's Creative Coworking Club was thriving. Every Sunday, creatives with corporate 9-5s would gather to work on passion projects they'd been putting off.

At $25 per session (or $45/month for a pro pass), the community was growing.

Meet some of our favorite regulars!

(portraits doodled from memory)

Eddie

Energy consultant by day,

indie songwriter by night

Energy consultant by day, indie songwriter by night

Sophia

A&R Ops Manager by day,

food content creator by night

A&R Ops Manager by day, food content creator by night

Ayesha

Finance data analyst by day,

learning design by night

Finance data analyst by day, learning design by night

Elyas

SWE by day,

creating a short film by night

SWE by day, creating a short film by night

PROBLEM

Manual personalization was a bottleneck for growth

When event signups were low, we would manually text previous attendees because we found personal touches drove significantly higher response rates.

GENERIC COPY & PASTE

HIGHLY PERSONALIZED

6 hours per week spent...

Reading through onboarding questions from Airtable

Finding repeat attendees who were likely to return

Manually crafting and sending out messages inviting them to the next session

SOLUTION PREVIEW

Customized messaging at scale, based on attendee onboarding data

RESEARCH

Competitors are overly complex + expensive

SMS pricing plans are expensive and you often need to write custom code for highly personalized flows. At the rate Creative Coworking Club was scaling, we decided to build our tool internally as an investment in the future.

Process for building SMS flows in Twilio

No one wants their time wasted

I interviewed the Verci growth team to understand their workflow, along with event attendees to understand their habits.

Events hosts need efficiency...

􀐫

Manual process was unsustainable: team spent more time crafting messages than analyzing results

􀻸

Audience segments needed different approaches (e.g. Pro pass holders vs. first-time attendees)

Attendees don’t want spam...

􀌤

Personal touches drove 2x higher response rates

Generic messages get glossed over and lost in the sea of SMS slop.

SOLUTION

Custom audience segments

All variable fields from the onboarding from are connected to Airtable, allowing us to filter and reach a niche audience segment. For example, what if I want to craft a message for designers who live in NYC that have attended at least 2 or more sessions?

Reviewing highly personalized messages

Beyond just an audience segment, hosts can generate messages per individual attendee based on their short answer questions from onboarding.

ITERATIONS FOR SCALE

Template library goes from 5 → 50?

How do I quickly find the Brooklyn re-engagement template for musicians?

BEFORE

Standard list view

List view sorted by date sent

What happens when we have more than 3 recent templates?
No way to filter or search

V2 FOR SCALE

Starred and categorized templates

Keep frequently used templates starred at top
Two-level categorization system that follows user mental models of “I want to re-engage people” → “specifically people in Brooklyn”

Error prevention at scale

How do you give users extra confidence that they're messaging the right people?