How Sanctum's solo designer became a "1.5x designer team" without hiring

When Cleon joined Sanctum to lead design, he was the only designer on a team of 15. He’d been using Mobbin for years by then, stumbled into it the way most designers do, but had never paid for it. Joining Sanctum changed that.

“It was probably the first design tool that we paid for, apart from Figma. I was the only designer. Mobbin made it feel like maybe I had one and a half designers.”

The extra half designer wasn’t about speed.

“It’s not like I increased my design speed by 50%. I do my best work when I can discuss or sound off ideas with other designers. I had no one to do that with when I first joined. But the references on Mobbin kind of gave that same type of discussion — in my own head.”

Before Mobbin

Cleon’s research workflow before Mobbin was the one most designers know: download apps, screenshot flows, save to a folder, hope you’ll find them again. Pinterest and Twitter for general inspiration. Manual screenshots when he needed something specific. He still does it occasionally, for references Mobbin doesn’t cover yet. He doesn’t recommend it.

“My phone would be exploding. Running out of memory.”

Cleon’s always been a collector. Ideas come from physical products, from the real world, not just screens.

“Mobbin just made it a lot more accessible and efficient to distill a large amount of ideas into solving a specific design problem.”

Designing a gamified finance app

Sanctum’s core business is B2B: Solana’s leading staking infrastructure, powering liquid staking for the biggest crypto platforms. This year they shipped their first consumer product, a mobile app for retail users, built around an idea Cleon describes as harder than anything he’d designed before.

A gamified financial app.

“Designing games is much more difficult than designing a normal product. Your product has to make sense, but it also has to be fun.”

The financial half had no shortage of references on Mobbin — Wise, Revolut, the full shelf of neobank UI. Cleon pulled flows for days. The game half he had to source the old way: downloading PUBG and Brawl Stars, and logging several hours of what he would probably describe as research.

“Mobbin was very useful in the first part. There were a lot of references for app interfaces. For the second part — from what I know, not so much yet.”

Using references to remove, not just add

“I look at references on Mobbin not just for what to add — but more so, what should I remove? What have other products managed to remove from this flow, but yet still make the design make sense?”

Then he went further.

“Maybe having 2× the references actually slowed my process down. But that’s a good thing. Ultimately with design, you want the best idea. The best idea wins — not always the fastest idea.”

We liked hearing that. (It’s also, roughly, why Mobbin exists.)

How a two-person team uses Mobbin

Sanctum’s design team is two people now: Cleon and a senior designer with 10-15 years of experience. They use Mobbin differently. Cleon copies screenshots into a Figma exploration page, annotated, sectioned, titled. His colleague opens it and scrolls. The role Mobbin plays is identical.

“It’s primarily for references, inspiration, and ideas. The fundamental need is the same.”

When they hit a wall mid-conversation, one of them pulls up Mobbin and they scroll together.

“When we reach a point in our discussion where we need references, we just reach for Mobbin. It’s not like we go on Pinterest or X.”

References travel outside design too, to the PM, the CEO. Always as screenshots.

“When non-designers send references, they send the app download link. And I’m like, which part of the app? So we send very specific screenshots instead. You open it on Telegram, you see it immediately, you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Not just a junior designer’s tool

Cleon also pushed back on a perception he sees online.

“The designers mentioning Mobbin a lot are mostly junior. You don’t really see senior design leads at big companies talking about it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not using it. References are a key part of the design process no matter how experienced you are. We’re not afraid to admit that we use Mobbin.”

It’s part of a broader belief he holds about teams.

“With a few very good designers and the right tools, a small team can do a lot.”

What changed with MCP

Cleon was an early user of Mobbin’s MCP. He’s also our most clear-eyed early user.

“I’m going to the web app less. I describe what I’m looking for, sometimes with a screenshot of my current design — this is what it looks like now, find me 10 other apps that have solved the same problem — and 2 or 3 minutes later I’m back in Figma.”

He worked one thing out early:

“You have to specifically mention don’t be limited to my industry. Otherwise it finds similar apps — fintech for fintech, fitness for fitness. Different industries have solved the same problems. The whole point is to look at the problem, not the vertical.”

He’s pushed it further, asking the model to distill patterns and suggest a design direction. The output becomes more references, not a finished design.

“I have maybe 10 references from the apps it pulls, plus 3 suggestions. Total: 13 references. That’s still useful.”

What if Mobbin went away tomorrow?

We asked.

“Design still carries on. My work still carries on. I’d go back to downloading apps. I’ve already got a good repository of references in my head that I’ve gathered through years of collecting — that’s the hard skill as a designer. But without Mobbin, it’d be harder to take the exploration a step further. I probably couldn’t explore ideas as much in the same amount of time.”

A solo designer didn’t ask for speed. He asked for someone to think with, and got close enough from a library of references.

“Ultimately with design, the best idea wins. Not always the fastest idea.”

Since this interview, Cleon has joined Mobbin and is now on the Mobbin design team.