Building a comic platform from zero-from MVP to a Top 3 App Store product.

Unlike joining an established product, the challenge at Comico Vietnam was to build a consumer product from the ground up. The initial product specification already existed, but design assets were scattered across multiple design tools and documentation formats-making collaboration increasingly difficult as the team grew.

Besides designing product features, one of my first contributions was establishing a unified design workflow for the entire team. Systems thinking before screen thinking.

When I joined the project, design resources were fragmented. Different designers worked with different software. Documentation existed in multiple formats. Component reuse was almost impossible. As the product expanded, maintaining consistency became increasingly expensive.

Solution

I proposed migrating the entire product into Figma. Instead of simply moving screens, we reorganized the product into a scalable design workspace-shared component library, design tokens, reusable layouts, standardized naming conventions, organized documentation, and a unified handoff workflow.

Although relatively simple by today's standards, this significantly improved collaboration across designers and engineers, and laid the foundation for future product development.

Unlike enterprise software, consumer products depend heavily on emotion and habit. We continuously validated assumptions with real readers through online surveys, user interviews, reading behavior observation, community comic events, social media feedback, and customer support reports.

Rather than asking users what features they wanted, we focused on understanding why people read comics every day, when they stopped, what motivated premium purchases, and what created long-term engagement. These insights directly influenced feature prioritization.

Comico was the first product where I was responsible for writing functional specification documents for every feature I designed.

Initially, I thought documentation was simply describing screens. As I worked with engineers, QA, business, and marketing teams, I realized documentation is actually about translating product thinking into a shared language that every team can understand.

For every feature, I had to define:

• Business goals
• User flows
• Functional requirements
• Business rules
• Edge cases
• Error and empty states
• Validation rules
• Dependencies between features
• Acceptance criteria
• Analytics events when necessary

Writing documentation forced me to think beyond UI. Instead of asking "How should this screen look?", I learned to ask: What problem are we solving? What scenarios can happen? What happens if something fails? What information does engineering need? How will QA validate the feature? How can stakeholders understand the behavior without opening Figma?

This experience fundamentally changed how I approach product design. It taught me to think in systems, behaviors, and product logic rather than individual screens-becoming the foundation of my later work in Design Systems, Product Architecture, and AI-native products.

Although user growth exceeded expectations, revenue did not. Several factors contributed:

• Vietnam's digital comic market was still emerging.
• Users were highly price-sensitive.
• Paid reading habits were not yet mature.
• COVID-19 significantly changed market conditions.
• The business model relied heavily on premium chapter purchases.

Eventually, after approximately three years of operation, NHN decided to withdraw from the Vietnamese market and discontinue the product.

Looking back, Comico was where I transitioned from designing interfaces to designing products. It taught me how research, business strategy, engineering constraints, and user experience intersect to create-or limit-a product's success.

Although Comico Vietnam eventually closed, the experience fundamentally shaped how I approach product design today: not as a collection of screens, but as a system balancing user value, business viability, and long-term scalability.