Beep
Available on the app store
Reimagining Voicemail: Beep, a Voice-First Social App
Founding Product Designer, Branding
📡 The Signals
I’ve been a card carrying internet kid since the days of ICQ, AIM, MySpace, old tumblr, and the very first year of Facebook. Back then being online meant you were surrounded by your friends and their friends. I loved these early social networks, but over time the network disappeared and what was left was just social media.
The rise of algorithms, enshittification, and relentless growth warped social products people once loved into something unrecognizable. Even Gen Z feels nostalgic, chasing the vibe of times they only know through stories and aesthetics.
The articles I was reading, the social media posts I was consuming, my own personal feelings, these were all just fragmented signals from the zeitgeist, disconnected but restless, waiting for something to bind them into an idea.
🔥 The Spark
The spark for Beep came when I saw a comedian’s TikTok skit about what voicemail used to be like:
It was a just a funny skit, but it was the trigger that set my feelings on fire and everything into motion.
I started digging into the social voice app landscape. I know Clubhouse had it’s moment in 2020, but its focus on stages and audiences was the opposite of the intimate, playful vibe that I felt social networks used to have. The more I researched, the more promising signals I found. It was enough to push me from curiosity into action, diving head first into building a voice first social app for today.
🧭 The Exploration
I started with the core experience of voicemail — you need a greeting and an experience for listening back to messages. I wrestled with how far to lean into voicemail nostalgia: could an inbox fill up like the old days? Should a greeting expire? Should you only be able to skip or delete messages? The trick was balancing old-school charm with something that felt new.
The very first iterations of greetings and messages, the core interaction design that shaped Beep’s foundation.
A peek inside the brainstorm.
I focused on prototyping fast to shape the core experience.
The very first prototype of Beep. Greeting, leave a message, inbox.
With the prototype in hand, I started showing it to people whose product instincts I trusted, former colleagues and peers I’d worked with before. Their feedback helped me pressure test the idea and refine the core flows. One of them, a former Head of Product at Headspace, was so impressed with the prototype that they immediately offered to back the idea and help get developers on board. It was a clear signal that Beep had legs beyond just a sketch on my screen.
🎨 The Visual Design & Brand
The foundations of the prototype were solid enough for basic development to get started. The next step for me was building out the brand and design system to give Beep its own voice and visual identity.
I started collecting references and inspiration for Beep’s look and feel.
I wanted Beep to feel big and expressive, not just a container for sound.
Knowing what kind of friend Beep would be helped solidify the brand direction.
Humanizing the app made it easier to nail the voice and tone of the brand.
I pulled deep from references that shaped my own internet childhood, Playstation 2 era video games, MySpace profile pics, 80s/90s anime. I wanted the brand to feel nostalgic and unpolished in the right ways: playful, chaotic, and a little weird, but still approachable to a modern, young audience.
The low-poly aesthetic leaves space for people to imagine themselves in the app, while keeping the focus on voice and personality instead of polished images.
While shaping the brand, I applied it directly to the user experience, translating the identity into UI, interactions, and into the overall look and feel.
🏁 The 1.0 Push
Once the brand direction clicked, I finally got to make Beep look like Beep. I wrapped up the remaining screens, polished the flows, and we finally had Beep in its 1.0 form.
🚀 The Beginning
After the feedback, tests, and pivots, Beep finally felt whole, a friends-first voice app that looked, sounded, and worked the way I had imagined from the start.
Beep is live in friends and family mode. Scrappy, real, and out in the world. It’s just the beginning, but hearing my friends’ voices in the app every day reminds me exactly why I built it.