Case Study File #001 — Exhibit A
Grintafy.
Taking the biggest sporting app in the Middle East behind a paywall — without it reading as a toll on someone's career.
01 — Record of first contact
An unplanned conversation in Riyadh.
Contact occurred at LEAP in Riyadh in 2023. Our regional team was present, as was the subject's founder. The conversation was unplanned. It led to a product review, and the review led to an engagement.
No proposal was submitted at any stage.
Grintafy has operated as a football talent discovery platform across Saudi Arabia and North Africa since 2021. The system carried separate account types for the individual player, the club, and the field owner running their own venue application.
02 — Condition on arrival
A working product with no design function.
The subject arrived with a development team, no design function, and more than a million downloads already on the product. Interface files were held in Adobe XD and returned on a cycle slow enough to hold releases behind them.
The product worked. What it did not do was communicate anything about the company that had built it.
A product with a million people inside it does not permit experimentation in public.
The scale is the relevant detail. Every decision from this point carried an audience that was already there.
03 — Scope of engagement
The rebrand was considered, and declined.
The mark was sound. Replacing it would have consumed the budget without addressing the defect.
Scope was set at interaction design for version 2.0 — an overhaul of an application already in market rather than a build from zero. The branding stayed untouched and the behaviour underneath it was rebuilt, so that the product began to match what the mark had been claiming.
The value was already inside the system.
Clubs were searching. Players wanted locating. Nothing in the interface surfaced that exchange at the point either party could act on it.
04 — Work carried out
One path to being seen.
Work concentrated on the single moment a player becomes visible to a scout. The profile, the footage, the ratings and the tryout all sat inside the same product — but not on the same path. The redesign put them in one.
05 — Complication entered into record
A paywall on somebody's career.
A paid tier runs on the platform under the name Grintafy Plus, raising a player's visibility and improving the odds of reaching a club's shortlist.
Designing a paywall into a product whose subject is opportunity carries a specific risk. Positioned wrongly, it stops reading as a service and starts reading as a fee levied against someone's career.
Most of the work here went into avoiding that reading.
Plus is introduced where the player is already succeeding, states what it adds rather than what it withholds, and never gates the profile a player has built.
06 — Disposition
Figures on record.
2M+
Registered players
200K+
Games & tryouts organised
4
SAFF · Serie A · West Ham United · Al-Ittihad
001
App of the Year — GITEX
Those are the subject's figures across its full history, not ours. What this file records is narrower: a product carrying a million users was handed to a design wing that had not built it, and it went back out without breaking.
07 — Takeaways
What the file establishes.
Don't rebrand a sound mark
A rebrand is the expensive answer to a problem that is usually behavioural. The defect here was never the logo — it was that nothing in the interface surfaced the exchange the product existed to make.
Monetise the win, not the wall
When the subject of a product is opportunity, a paywall has to be introduced at a moment of progress and described by what it adds. Position it as a gate and it reads as a toll.
Scale removes the sandbox
Past a million users there is no quiet release. Every change ships to an audience that is already there, which makes sequencing a design decision rather than a delivery detail.
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