ShortStack is a platform for building online contests, giveaways, forms, and landing pages, the kind of campaign a marketing team needs to ship fast, without a developer.
I joined in 2011, when the founder I’d worked with at his ad agency pivoted the company into software. Over the next nine years I designed the product itself: the builders customers worked in, the templates they started from, the marketing site, and the brand around all of it. Mostly solo.
The tools and the things people made with them came from the same desk. I designed the contest builder, then designed the templates that filled it.
And it went past the screen. Marketing, digital, swag, stickers, shirts. If it carried the ShortStack name, I probably made it (including that sign you see above).
001 CONDITIONS
Conditions.
// Build
- CONTEST EDITOR (DRAG-AND-DROP BUILDER)
- FORM BUILDER
- TEMPLATE GALLERY AND TEMPLATES
- MARKETING SITE AND BLOG
- BRAND AND GRAPHIC DESIGN
// Maintain and expand
- UI/UX ACROSS THE PLATFORM
- TEMPLATE LIBRARY AND STYLE THEMES
- MARKETING SITE AND CONTENT
- CUSTOM CONTEST BUILDS FOR CLIENTS
// Collaborate
- FOUNDERS
- ENGINEERING
- MARKETING
- SALES
- CLIENTS
002 PRINCIPLE
Start simple, go as deep as you want.
The customer was a business owner, not a developer. The job was a tool simple enough to start in minutes and deep enough that nobody hit a ceiling. Open a template and change a headline, or start from a blank canvas and style every element by hand. Same tool, same screen. Everything I designed for ShortStack works that way.
003 APPLIED TO THE CONTEST
Applied to the contest.
// The contest editor
The editor was drag-and-drop and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Add a widget, move it, restyle it, and the live preview updated as you went. Customers started from a template or a blank page and took it as far as they wanted. I designed the builder, the widget set, the style themes, and the templates that shipped inside it. A business owner with no developer could build and launch a contest the same day.
004 APPLIED TO THE FORM
Applied to the form.
// The form builder
The form builder is almost a builder within a builder. Drop in fields, set validation, add entry restrictions, refer-a-friend mechanics, instant-win logic, and integrations, without leaving the form. It’s where a contest turns into collected data, so it had to hold a lot of power without feeling heavy. Customers set up instant-win giveaways and referral contests on their own, in the same place they built the form.
005 APPLIED TO THE GALLERY
Applied to the gallery.
// Template gallery
Every template in the gallery was built to a real customer need or request. Customers filtered by goal (giveaways, voting, quizzes, lead capture), favorited the ones they liked, and saved their own builds back into the library. It grew with the customer base.
006 THE LONG VIEW
The long view.
// The full surface
Alongside the builders, I designed and ran the marketing site for years, a large, content-heavy site with an extensive blog that doubled as the customer’s how-to library. I built custom contests for national brands under nondisclosure, and handled the brand, graphics, and marketing materials. One designer, the whole surface.
The platform has been rebuilt several times since 2020. What’s on this page is the work as it stood: the record of what I built, not the product as it looks today.
Web design, photography, SEO, mobile design, copywriting…Lea at Moonshot does it all, and does it well. Being able to produce so many marketing and design elements in-house allows her to deliver a superior end product, on budget and on time.