Flashy OS

Problem

The agency ran on inboxes and spreadsheets. Bookings came through one channel, photographer assignments through another, edits over Slack, deliverables in expiring Dropbox links. Clients waited days to see versions. We needed one system: customers book, we produce, they download — without the seams.

Role

Built and ran the whole thing. Decided the modules — booking marketplace, internal admin pipeline (assignment + post-production), multi-tenant DAM with semantic search, AI image and image-to-video editors, version + comment threads, Meta social publisher, role-based access, and white-label share pages. Drew the data model, wrote the code, onboarded the team and clients, supported it daily. PM, builder, and ops in one person.

Outcome

Used daily for ~14 months until the agency sunset. Semantic search and the AI editor cleared a long-running bottleneck — clients stopped asking for 'the version with the blue mats' because they could just type it. Lessons: I over-engineered the invoicing module before talking to the people who'd use it, and under-engineered the deliverables module that turned out to be where the team actually lived. Next time I'd ship the rough version of the right thing instead of the polished version of the wrong thing.

Stack