Creator social network — Subscription social platform · NDA

Subscription social network for creators: paid tiers, locked photo and video, paid messages, card and crypto payments; MVP in four months.

Role: Software architect & lead backend developer; media pipeline, payments, infrastructure

Client: Startup (NDA)

Team: 4 developers (dedicated team)

Period: 2021–2023

A startup wanted to launch a platform where creators earn directly from their audience through subscriptions, paid posts and paid messages, and to learn from real users as early as possible. The product handles large volumes of photo and video and records detailed activity data, so the architecture had to stay fast while growing towards hundreds of thousands of users. The first release was due within four months.

WeDo assigned a dedicated team, and I designed the architecture and led the backend. Laravel 9 serves the API with Sanctum auth, WebSockets for messaging and notifications, FFmpeg transcoding to HLS and PDF invoices; a Vue 2 SPA brings a TipTap post editor, resumable tus uploads and an HLS.js player. Payments run through Stripe and USDT on Tron, media sits on Cloudflare Images and S3, and everything deploys to Kubernetes on AWS via Terraform. After launch we iterated on onboarding and sign-in using analytics.

Creator feed with photo, video and paid unlocks; bookmarks

Post editor with rich text, media upload, scheduling and preview

Paid messages with locked media, ticket filters, realtime notifications

Paid tiers, subscription management, Stripe payouts, USDT on Tron

Creator analytics on posts, interactions and earnings; admin with verification

MVP released four months after kickoff; 1,600+ commits by a team of four over 17 months

Laravel 9, Vue 2, MySQL, Stripe, FFmpeg + HLS, WebSockets, Cloudflare Images, Kubernetes, Terraform