Just About

The Challenge

Just About had a simple, slightly radical idea: the people who keep online communities alive — the posters, the clip-makers, the answer-givers — should actually get paid for it. They had funding and a vision somewhere between "community platform" and "Reddit, but fair". What they didn't have was a tech team.

So we became it. Not just building the thing, but planning the architecture, hiring the engineers, and running the whole technical side until they were ready to take it in-house.

Our Approach

We put together a small team: a backend engineer building the core API in Strapi, a frontend engineer working component-first in Storybook, and the app itself in Next.js holding it all together.

The genuinely hard problem was payments. Just About's whole model is distributing money from brand partners to community members based on what they contribute — which means you need an algorithm that can weigh both the quality and quantity of contributions and split a pot fairly. Get it wrong in one direction and you reward spam; get it wrong in the other and the most dedicated people feel cheated. We went through several iterations before the maths felt fair, and "felt fair" matters as much as "was fair" when real people are watching their earnings.

Users could also embed their own content from YouTube, Twitch and TikTok — with verification to confirm ownership, so nobody could earn off someone else's videos. Less glamorous than it sounds, more fiddly than it sounds.

The Results

Twelve months in, the platform raised a Series A and Just About hired their own full-time tech team — which is rather the point of how we hand things over. We built it, we ran it, and when they were ready, we got out of the way.