Fanjolt: a marketplace for fans and talent
We built Fanjolt from scratch: a Rails marketplace for personalized video messages, live calls and exclusive experiences, with a share of each transaction going to the talent's chosen charity.
The product
Fanjolt let fans book personalized video messages, live calls and exclusive experiences with a curated roster of athletes, musicians and other public figures. A portion of each transaction went to the talent's chosen charity.
The founding team needed a technical partner who could build quickly while handling payments and time-sensitive fulfillment. We designed and developed the entire two-sided marketplace.
Booking and fulfillment
Fans could browse talent by category, including sports, entertainment and music, then book a video message with specific instructions or buy a live-call slot or exclusive experience. They could track each request from purchase to delivery.
Talent managed availability and pricing, accepted or declined requests within a defined window, and recorded and submitted videos. They could also track earnings and charitable donation allocations.
Sidekiq jobs handled video processing, email notifications and fulfillment deadlines. Missed deadlines triggered automated refunds. Stripe Connect split payments between the platform, talent and charity; Redis caching handled traffic spikes during promotions.
The video pipeline
Uploaded videos needed multiple encoded formats and thumbnails, then had to reach fans within minutes of submission. We built a multi-stage pipeline that kept this work out of the main application.
Rails let us iterate on early feedback. PostgreSQL provided relational integrity for transactions, while Redis and Sidekiq handled caching and asynchronous processing during peak load.
After launch
Within months, Fanjolt had onboarded dozens of talent profiles and served more than 1,000 fans. Transactions ran reliably, response times stayed below a second, and the platform scaled through promotional pushes without incident. The charity component also helped attract talent who wanted their fans' purchases to support causes they cared about.
Our role
We handled database architecture, API design, payment integration, background jobs, the deployment pipeline and ongoing maintenance. We worked directly with the founding team and advised on product decisions where we could reduce scope without sacrificing the user experience.