Astrolink · eSapiens Tecnologia S.A. · 2011–2018
How a recalibrated business model, one onboarding insight, and a mobile-first redesign turned Brazil's largest astrology community into its leading platform.
Product Designer · Product Manager
Context
For a share of users, astrology was entertainment. But the core audience used Astrolink for something deeper: self-knowledge. They read every interpretation, opened the app daily to check new planetary positions, and used what they learned as input for real decisions.
That distinction shaped everything. A product that's entertainment competes for attention. A product that's part of someone's decision-making routine earns a different kind of loyalty, and a different willingness to pay.
The platform had strong organic traffic: around 1,000 new sign-ups every day, with no paid acquisition. The problem was never getting people to the door. It was that too many gave up at the door, the product gave away too much of its value for free, and the mobile experience its users wanted didn't exist.
The team was small: Wladimir, founder and developer, a handful of devs, and me owning research, product, and design end to end.
Phase One — Business Model
Astrolink wasn't free, but conversion was low for a simple reason: the free tier already delivered most of the value. There was no journey left to sell.
Instead of just raising the paywall, we mapped the user's success journey: what a Learner needs at each stage to become an Expert, and what an Expert needs to go deeper. Then we repositioned features along that journey, moving the ones tied to progression into premium.
There was real fear of breaking the community's trust. We moved gradually, kept the subscription price low, and expanded into new products and features over time. The community stayed. Conversion multiplied.
The other lever was onboarding. The birth chart is the product's core value, and it's impossible without complete birth data. But asking for everything upfront was costing us a large share of those 1,000 daily sign-ups.
We spent real time on the conventional UX playbook first: social login, geolocation search for birthplace, smarter field ordering, fewer steps. Each iteration made completion faster and entry smoother. And each one, honestly, moved the needle less than we hoped. We were optimizing the form when the form was the wrong frame.
The breakthrough came from reframing the problem: let users finish sign-up without the complete data, and show them a Preliminary Chart, visibly incomplete, with a clear message that the full chart was waiting for the missing information.
Instead of a form blocking the value, the value itself asked for the data. Daily sign-ups grew from around 1,000 to nearly 2,000, on the same organic traffic. And completion followed, because now users had a real reason to come back and finish.
With the new model and the new funnel, the company reached breakeven before a single screen of the redesign existed.
Phase Two — The Redesign
With the business standing on its own, we could invest in the product the users had been asking for. The structured redesign started in late 2017: three months of research overlapping with three months of development. Four to five months from kickoff to closed beta.
We interviewed 25+ users and combined it with behavioral data from Hotjar, Google Analytics, and internal BI.
Two profiles emerged. The Learner: curious, early in the journey, needing guidance and interpretation. The Expert: fluent in the language of astrology, wanting depth, precision, and tools rather than explanations.
Four insights drove the redesign:
Trust barrier
Astrology carries skepticism. The product needed credibility signals at every step, not mystical aesthetics.
Onboarding friction
Already addressed in Phase One, but the app had to carry the Preliminary Chart logic natively.
Content density
Experts wanted everything. Learners drowned in it. One information architecture couldn't serve both without progressive disclosure.
No recurring hook
The reason to come back daily existed astrologically, in the planetary movements, but wasn't built into the product experience.
The redesign was mobile-first from day one. Progressive architecture that let Learners go deep gradually while giving Experts direct access to their tools. Credibility built through clean, precise design instead of mystical clichés. And the daily planetary movements finally turned into a product feature: the recurring hook the data said was missing.
We launched through a closed beta with the most engaged community members before full rollout. Their feedback shaped the final product, and their advocacy carried the launch.
Impact
Breakeven came before the redesign shipped, and Astrolink became Brazil's leading astrology platform.
The growth had many contributors: an engaged community, a founder who deeply knew the domain, and strong organic reach. What I own directly: the research, the success journey that recalibrated the freemium model, the onboarding architecture, and the end-to-end design of the apps.
People
This project happened because of people who showed up every day and cared about getting it right.
Wladimir built Astrolink from scratch out of pure passion — and trusted us to take it further. Rafael Parigi, Carol, and Guaru brought the product to people in ways design alone never could. Diego, Ícaro, Mauê, Jonas, André, and Washington turned every decision into something real and working.
Thank you.
Learnings
The best onboarding insight didn't come from optimizing the form. It came from reframing the problem: don't ask for data before showing value, use the value to justify the data. I've reused that principle in every product since.
Freemium fails in two directions. Give too little and nobody starts. Give too much and nobody pays. The only way to find the line is mapping what success looks like for the user, stage by stage, and pricing the progression.
And products with passionate communities demand a different kind of care: every monetization move is a trust decision. Moving gradually wasn't slow, it was what made the change stick.
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