WeCinema lets independent filmmakers buy, sell and share work. Every meaningful decision in the build came from one problem: a two-sided marketplace is worthless to both sides until it already has both sides.
Independent filmmakers have finished work and no distribution. Buyers — brands, agencies, producers — want independent work and have no efficient way to find it. Both sides exist; there is simply no venue where they can see each other.
The cold-start problem in its purest form. Creators will not upload to a marketplace with no buyers, and buyers will not visit a marketplace with no work. Building both sides simultaneously and launching to an empty room is the standard way this fails.
The tradeoff is stated next to each decision, because a case study that only lists wins isn't telling you anything useful.
This is the answer to cold start. Upload, organise, present and share your work behind a real page is a portfolio — useful on day one, with no demand side required. Supply accumulates while the marketplace is still empty.
TradeoffMeaningful build effort spent on tools that generate no revenue directly, in service of the marketplace existing at all.
Every other feature is downstream of playback working. A marketplace where the preview stutters does not get to have a conversion problem, because nobody reaches checkout.
TradeoffTranscoding and delivery infrastructure consumed time that could have gone to marketplace features, before any transaction existed to justify it.
It turns each creator into a distribution channel. They share their own page, which brings their audience to the platform — the least expensive demand generation available.
TradeoffPublic pages have to be fast and good-looking enough that a creator is willing to put their name on them, which raises the bar on the whole presentation layer.
Those pages are the acquisition surface. They have to load fast on a shared link and be indexable.
TradeoffMore rendering complexity than a client-only app would have needed.
Next.js with server rendering for public creator and work pages — these are the shareable, indexable acquisition surface, so they cannot be client-rendered. Node and PostgreSQL handle listings, transactions and payouts. Video is handled out of band: uploads go straight to storage, transcoding runs asynchronously, and delivery is separated from the application path so a large upload never blocks browsing. Stripe covers payments in and creator payouts out.
The standard failure is to build both sides at once and launch into a marketplace with no supply and no demand. WeCinema inverts it: the creator tools are a portfolio product that is genuinely useful before a single buyer arrives. Filmmakers upload because it serves them immediately, and the marketplace acquires supply while it is still, technically, empty. The marketplace layer then switches on over a catalogue that already exists.
Uploads are large, connections are unreliable, and playback quality determines whether anyone browses at all. This work is invisible when it succeeds and terminal when it fails, so it received attention out of proportion to its visibility — before there was any transaction volume to justify it.
The business site has to convince a filmmaker and a buyer on the same page, and they want opposite things: creators want reach and control, buyers want selection and licensing clarity. This was a harder writing problem than an engineering one, and it took more revision than any single feature in the build.
Upload, transcoding and delivery before any marketplace feature, because everything downstream depends on playback being solid.
Upload, organisation, presentation and shareable public work pages — server-rendered, fast, and worth a creator's name.
Listings, discovery, buy and sell flows, payments and creator payouts on top of a catalogue that already existed.
The two-audience marketing site, plus launch with real supply already on the platform.
Licensing terms were treated as a detail and should have been a first-class part of the listing model. Buyers of creative work care about usage rights as much as price, and bolting that on later is far messier than designing listings around it from the beginning.
MadeInPK connects Pakistani textile mills with international buyers who have no reliable way to tell a real supplier from a fraudulent one. Apps, web, escrow and admin tooling — designed and built end-to-end.
A social iOS app where the AI writes the compliment and the sender attaches real money to it. Combining generative text with a working wallet is where nearly all the engineering went.
A face-and-memory quiz game with daily challenges and head-to-head battles, built around the retention cliff that ends most casual games within days of install.
Tell me what you're making and who it's for. I'll tell you the smallest version worth shipping — and what it costs.