Armando
Vera Carvajal
I build new content and media experiences from nothing. Live-streamed broadcasts, OTT content platforms, consumer products people keep coming back to. The person a team hands a rough idea to when it has to be given a voice, a look, and a reason for someone to stop and feel something.
Hangtight
Co-Founder & CEO · Sole Product & Design Owner · Consumer platform for the university-housing ecosystem
- The problem
- Student housing communities were fragmented across dead group chats and flyers. No shared place for residents to actually connect, and no clear path for housing staff to reach them.
- My role
- Sole product and design owner. Every research call, wireframe, prototype, and shipped screen across mobile and web was mine, operating solo alongside engineering.
- Constraint
- Zero paid acquisition budget. Growth had to come entirely from a product experience good enough that students brought other students.
How I approached it
I ran a continuous research cadence with real students and housing staff, then translated what I heard into wireframes, functional Figma prototypes, and usability tests. The loop was tight: build, test with real users, cut what didn't earn engagement, ship again.
The design bet that mattered: retention over reach. With no ad budget, every decision optimized for whether a student came back on day 7, 14, and 30, not vanity signups. That discipline is what produced 69% D7 and 41% D30, numbers that read as genuine product-market fit rather than a launch spike.
I also built a reusable design system so a solo designer could ship at the pace of a team, keeping discovery and engagement patterns consistent across every surface as the product grew.
"When the question is can he actually design and ship something people keep using, Hangtight is the answer."
Built for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The first fully digital-native cohorts to enter university housing form community online before they ever meet in a hallway, at a time when student belonging and retention are top pressures for institutions. Hangtight meets them where they already are.
Online Demo Week
VP of Product / Program Director, Newchip · A live-streamed content experience, built from 0-to-1 during the pandemic, designed for both sides of the platform
- The problem
- A static accelerator program needed to put hundreds of startups in front of thousands of investors, on a repeatable schedule, in a way that felt like appointment viewing rather than a webinar. I had to build it from 0-to-1 during the COVID-19 pandemic, on a limited budget, with everything remote.
- My role
- Conceived, designed, and shipped it from 0-to-1. Owned the concept, the experience design, and execution across a team of designers and editors.
- The stakes
- VCs and angels relied on the broadcast to make real funding decisions. The experience had to be credible enough to move capital.
The insight: I designed for two audiences at once
The audience side. Investors needed to move through dozens of pitches without fatigue, find the ones worth their attention, and trust what they were seeing. I designed the viewing experience and broadcast flow around discovery and credibility.
The creator side. Founders had to submit and participate at scale without friction. I built a seamless submission and participation flow, then coached founders on how to prepare, position, and present so their content actually landed on screen.
Quality control. I reviewed and validated every submission across hundreds of startups per cycle, keeping the bar high enough that the live experience stayed credible to the investors watching.
I hosted the keynote stage on-camera
Beyond designing the experience, I was the face of it. I recruited and hosted the keynote lineup, bringing on and interviewing distinguished guests live, including Joe Lonsdale (Co-Founder, Palantir and 8VC), Robert Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet), Noah Kagan (Founder, AppSumo), Katherine Boyle (a16z), Jeff Davidoff (former CMO, Orbitz and the ONE Campaign), and Jordan Beckerman (Partner & Producer, Yale Productions). Attracting talent of that caliber, and holding the room live, is its own kind of design work.
A portfolio of format bets: live, audio, and in-person
Demo Week was one part of a broader mandate: test new content formats to bring people together beyond the core online product. I created and ran a 25+ episode podcast, the livestreamed Demo Week, and, once the pandemic lifted, in-person casual entertainment experiences and 3+ travel retreats across Mexico and the US, probing which formats actually built community offline. Livestreams, podcasts, and casual entertainment experiences, the same three frontiers this team is building, are formats I've already designed and shipped.
"I wasn't just designing for the audience watching the content. I was designing the experience for the creators submitting it, at scale, on a repeatable cadence, with a quality bar."
Built for Millennials and Gen X. The audience was professional investors and founders, reached at the moment the pandemic forced high-stakes business events online, a shift in how this cohort discovers and evaluates opportunity that has proven durable well beyond it.
Sondersage
Concept designed end-to-end · An OTT content platform for self-actualization, told through the world's most respected people
What it is: a "MasterClass for becoming who you're capable of being." I designed the entire platform end-to-end, unprompted, as my Product Leadership capstone, then pursued it as a startup. It never raised capital. That's not the point. The point is this is the work I do when no one is paying me to.
What I designed
The full product: a 100+ episodic "journey" content roadmap, a talent and guide model, a three-phase production pipeline, the end-to-end customer journey, an analytics framework, monetization architecture, and the app experience across TV, mobile, and web.
The analog frontier
Sondersage included Sagaz, a companion print magazine designed as a deliberate bridge between digital content and something you could hold. A point of view I'd bring to a content team: the generation raised fully digital is reaching hardest for the tangible, and there's an under-explored ancillary layer in extending on-screen content into the real world.
Sondersage was mine to imagine. The capability behind it, taking a content platform from a blank page to a shippable vision, systems, talent model, production pipeline and all, is what I bring to whatever a team needs built next.
Sondersage is an unshipped concept project. The public figures shown across these screens and covers appear purely as illustrative placeholder casting, to convey the intended format and tone. No affiliation, endorsement, participation, or agreement is implied or exists; none of the individuals were approached or attached, and no rights to any name or likeness are claimed.
Built for Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. A generation coming of age in an anxious, algorithm-shaped world is reaching past influencer noise for something real: substantive role models who can actually shape a life. Sondersage was designed for that hunger, raw, credible guidance at a moment when it feels scarce and matters more than ever.
Why the instincts are good
I paint, I write, I film, I climb, I've lived and studied across continents, and I'm native across two of the largest audiences any content platform serves. Not a list of hobbies, the reason I have a feel for what moves people, design for a global member rather than a demographic, and keep reaching for the cinematic over the merely functional.
