A SaaS admin tool for talent agencies, built to replace manual Excel tracking of creator metrics
Talent agencies and MCNs tracking creator performance — reach, engagement, follower growth, deal conversion — were doing it by hand in Excel, spread across spreadsheets with no shared access control. I set out to build a proper admin tool to replace that: a real web application, not another spreadsheet template.
I architected the system and directed its build using AI-assisted development — defining the data model, the API structure, and the security design myself, then directing implementation, testing, and debugging until it worked the way I'd specified. This wasn't a no-code tool: it's a real Node.js/Express backend with a PostgreSQL database and a React frontend, evolved from a single static prototype file into a working full-stack application.
Three roles — admin, manager, read-only analyst — with authentication via bcrypt-hashed passwords and JWT. The detail that mattered: permission checks are enforced at the API layer, on every endpoint, not just hidden behind UI buttons a determined user could bypass. If a role shouldn't see certain data, the server refuses the request — not just the interface.
The original plan was to pull creator metrics automatically via each platform's official API. I looked into the actual cost of that: paid third-party access, plus the engineering overhead of OAuth integration for every platform a client might use. It didn't hold up. Instead, I designed a universal CSV-upload system with automatic column detection — agencies export a report from whichever platform they use (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, anything), upload it, and the system figures out which column is reach, which is follower count, without being hard-coded to one platform's export format.
This wasn't the more technically impressive option — it was the more correct one. A universal file-upload system is less exciting to build than an API integration, but it doesn't lock users into one platform and doesn't carry an ongoing cost.
Deployed live — code on GitHub, frontend and backend running on Render, database on Neon. Not a local prototype or a slide deck: a real, working tool a talent agency could actually use, reachable in a browser.