The network for creativity
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Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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I’ve been looking for the "perfect client portal" for over a year.
Tried all the Notion templates, custom Framer portals, complex ClickUp setups... none stuck. They either needed too much manual maintenance or forced me into rigid workflows.
Yesterday, it hit me: why not just build my own unified system?
Using Contra and Upwork MCPs, I’m aggregating everything into one central workspace:
🧾 Invoices & payment status
⏳ Timelines & milestones
📋 Active tasks
💬 Cross-platform client chats
Dedicated to spending 1–2 hours a day on this build. Easy to update, effortless to scale, built 100% for my workflow.
I’ll be sharing the build process as I go!
Anyone else building custom MCP workflows instead of using off-the-shelf tools? 👇
Would you like to tune this for a specific platform, or focus more on the tech side?
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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A creative technologist takes an idea and works out what technology can do for it. Then builds the way it gets made, so it works a second time too.
That's the short version, as a 39-second pixel film. I'm the one with the hat.
In my own work it goes two ways. Creative workflows make the work: the images, clips and films. Operational ones keep it running, like the setup behind a team using AI every day. For both, the loop is the same: test it, break it, build it better.
The voice in the film is a synthetic version of mine. The animation is drawn in code.
Love this definition! "Works a second time too" is the real difference between a cool experiment and actual creative technology. Building the system so it repeats is where the craft is. That 39-second pixel film sounds fun - love that you put yourself in it with the hat! 😄
what if your portfolio page was just all of it?
we put every project from our contra profile on one wall for the new apollo studio site.
Really great to see all of your work
Lookin back at last year, for one project we had 6 working days to rebuild Human AI Academy's site before a launch.
The old site scored 45/100 on performance and took 6.2 seconds to load. With a launch about to send thousands of people to one page, that was the real risk. Not the design.
So speed came first. We built 30+ custom Framer components and kept every section light enough to load fast on launch day.
The result: 94/100 on performance, 1.8s load time, and launch week took them from 4,000 to 12,000 students.
What I keep relearning: on launch week, the page doesn't need to be clever. It needs to load before people lose interest.
That performance jump is impressive, especially with only six working days. A fast-loading site can make a real difference when a launch brings in thousands of visitors.