Housebets

Building the design function from scratch, introducing AI-assisted design and development workflows to rebuild the entire platform and design system.

Brief

Housebets is a crypto casino and sportsbook that had grown quickly without a design function. I joined as the Founding Head of Design to build the function from scratch, establish a design system, rebuild the platform, and reimagine the acquisition and onboarding experiences needed to support its next stage of growth.

Outcome

I led a redesign of the entire front end, starting with a surface-by-surface audit of the site and then building a design system with a shared UI package of 45+ components, shipping across 20 locales to players in 156 countries.

The on-chain bonus campaign became the biggest acquisition launch in the industry, generating 42,031 registrations in its first month, compared with 206–669 in each of the five months before it. Signup completion reached 75.9% in launch week, against a 20–28% baseline.

My Role

As Founding Head of Design I own design across the entire experience from the design system, to onboarding and acquisition, and in-house games. I work directly with engineering to take ideas from audit and concept through to production, using AI-assisted workflows to design and build alongside the team.

Beyond the product itself, I built the function around it: establishing the design system, workflows, hiring and onboarding frameworks, and growing the team from scratch.

Toolkit

Design: Figma · Claude Design · Adobe Illustrator

Build: Next.js · TypeScript · shadow-DOM custom elements · packages/ui

Research & analytics: PostHog · Linear · GitHub

Design: Figma · Claude Design · Adobe Illustrator

Build: Next.js · TypeScript · shadow-DOM custom elements · packages/ui

Research & analytics: PostHog · Linear · GitHub

Design: Figma · Claude Design · Adobe Illustrator

Build: Next.js · TypeScript · shadow-DOM custom elements · packages/ui

Research & analytics: PostHog · Linear · GitHub

Launching the industry’s largest acquisition campaign

Every casino offers the same generic welcome bonus. We wanted to make ours worth talking about.

The idea was to build a virality-driven acquisition campaign around the players we actually wanted: high-value crypto users with a proven on-chain history. Instead of asking everyone to sign up before showing them an offer, we could read their wallet activity first and give them a bonus based on what they had already done.

That meant the people most likely to be valuable to Housebets could receive the biggest offers, while the campaign itself gave them a reason to share it. The challenge was making that feel instant, trustworthy and completely frictionless.

Every casino offers the same generic welcome bonus. We wanted to make ours worth talking about.

Turn acquisition into an experience. A personalised offer, built around what players had already done.

I designed the campaign experience and visual assets and the result supported the industry’s largest acquisition campaign. Below is the shipped flow from homepage banner through to the offer credited confirmation.

Shipped flow — components/bonus/screens/

Live

Guest funnel — first two weeks after launch

PostHog

Banner CTA clicked

29,413 · 100.0%

Wallet scan started

22,311 · 75.9%

Wallet verified

10,916 · 37.1%

10,563 · 35.9%

Offer revealed

10,169 · 34.6%

Bonus credited

6,691 · 22.7%

The drop from wallet scan to verification is the honest cost of the multi-minute scan and the send-to-prove step. Roughly 30% of everyone who started a scan ended with a credited bonus.

Turning my hand to game design

We needed a new set of in-house games, but finding the right external partner was proving difficult. So I took on the game design myself, developing the mechanics, interaction models and visual direction from the ground up.

The result is our first set of original House games, with production builds now in development and scheduled to launch by the end of Q3 2026.

Real production bundles — dice · mines · plinko · keno · blackjack

Live

What can these games do that nobody else’s can?

Bet Burst

Exclusive mechanic · hold to chain

Lighting

Exclusive mechanic · big win

Drag to paint

Exclusive mechanic · Mines grid

Underneath, each game is a shadow-DOM custom element with its own provably-fair engine (HMAC-SHA256), autobet with strategy presets, a stats overlay, hotkeys and a full modal system. They run offline from a single file — a hard requirement so the backend team could swap the money engine in behind a documented adapter seam.

Production payout maths

Dice

multiplier = 99 / chance · 4 range modes

Mines

0.99 / Π (N−M−i)/(N−i) · grids 25–64

Plinko

C(n,k)·p^k·(1−p)^(n−k) · 8–16 rows

Keno

C(10,h)·C(30,k−h)/C(40,k) · 99% RTP

Every table prices at 99.000% RTP. Keno’s are exact-rational on 25 of 40 rows and within 1.5e-7 relative on the rest. Multiplier display floors at 2dp so a payout is never overstated.

A decision worth showing. The Dice range-type selector keeps glyph-only segments. That was challenged in review (AFF-677) for reading like four unlabelled switches; it was rebuilt with text labels, tested at 1440×900 and 393×852, put on an ephemeral build, and rejected. One change survived — the segment gap went 4px → 2px so the four abut and read as a single control. That was the defect. The note now lives in the spec so nobody “fixes” it again.

Status. The frontend is built. The backend is in development now and due for release at the end of Q3, with a significant lift to GGR expected.

Email-first, and pointed somewhere useful

I rebuilt signup around how people actually use the product: making email the primary path, bringing social and wallet options into balance, and sending new players straight into their first useful action: deposit.

Shipped flow — components/session/

Live

Email and social at equal weight. The previous layout gave Google and wallet the visual priority and pushed email underneath, despite email accounting for 84% of sign-ups.

Age confirmation where it belongs. 18+ moved out of the terms checkbox into its own explicit consent, with validation that names the missing condition rather than failing generically.

Then somewhere useful. First-time signups route to the Deposit modal rather than the Wallet page, with methods ordered by real usage and stablecoins pinned. 6,194 players started a deposit in July 2026.

What the work actually did

From the Housebets PostHog project, the frontend git history and the Linear boards. Each tile names its own source.

Acquisition

42,031

Players who completed registration in the on-chain launch month. The five months before ran 206–669.

PostHog · registration_completed · Jul 2026

Flow effectiveness

75.9%

Signup completion in launch week — 53,433 started, 40,529 finished — against a 20–28% baseline either side.

PostHog · weekly funnel · w/c 20 Jul 2026

Reveal reach

22,311

Players who started a guest wallet scan in the first two weeks, producing 555,748 scan events.

PostHog · onchain_bonus_guest_scan_started

Bonuses settled

6,691

Claimed and credited through the flow. A further 379 used the decline path — it needed to exist.

PostHog · onchain_bonus_credited

Delivery

205

Merged pull requests — 242 commits across 1,726 files. Fourth most active human contributor on the frontend.

git · gh pr list --author ismael964

Design system

Components in the shared UI package, from 13 pattern and component rebuilds off a full audit.

packages/ui/src · Linear AFF-214…AFF-332

Engagement

8,853

Players who viewed the XP Race leaderboard in six weeks, generating 49,583 views.

PostHog · leaderboard_viewed

Rewards adoption

3,694

Players who saved a rewards slider configuration — the control that previously arrived pre-set and unsaveable.

PostHog · rewards_slider_saved

Reach

Locales every pattern ships in, including Arabic with full RTL. Players registered from 156 countries.

apps/web/messages · PostHog geoip

Weekly signup completion rate

Launch week

Baseline

25.0%

29 Jun

20.0%

6 Jul

28.6%

13 Jul

75.9%

20 Jul

21.8%

27 Jul

22.7%

3 Aug

27.6%

10 Aug

The spike is the on-chain launch. Honest reading: a marketing push drove the traffic, so the defensible design claim is the conversion rate through the flow, not the volume that arrived at it. The launch-week audience also arrived pre-qualified via wallet scan, so it is not perfectly like-for-like with the organic baseline.

Rebuilding the design system

The product had grown quickly, but the foundations hadn’t kept up. The same patterns were being solved differently across the site, with inconsistent spacing, interaction models and components.

I started by auditing the product as a system rather than a collection of pages. Six pages had six different approaches to spacing. Three sliders used three different interaction models. There was no shared component library, and with multiple agencies contributing to the product, there was no consistent way of working.

The goal wasn’t to document what already existed. It was to work out what should become reusable, then rebuild those patterns properly.

That became the foundation for the House design system: shared tokens, foundations and components that could be used across the product instead of being rebuilt page by page.

The system now covers the core UI patterns across the product, with the same values feeding directly into the builds above.