Two-Sided Influencer Marketing Marketplace
A cloud-native marketplace connecting brands and creators directly—campaign management, offer negotiation, content approval, and automated Stripe payouts without agency fees.
The Problem
Influencer marketing runs on friction: brands find creators through manual DM outreach, negotiate scattered across email threads, track campaigns in spreadsheets, and settle payments through manual invoicing and wire transfers. Agencies smooth some of this over—at fees of 30-50% of campaign spend.
Both sides lose. Brands cannot scale campaigns beyond what manual coordination supports, creators wait on opaque payment cycles, and the relationship data—who worked with whom, on what terms, with what results—lives nowhere.
What We Built
We built a two-sided marketplace with the full campaign lifecycle inside it: vendors create campaigns and discover influencers, offers move through structured negotiation workflows, content gets delivered and approved in-platform, Stripe automates payouts, and Twilio powers vendor-influencer messaging. PostgreSQL with optimistic concurrency control keeps concurrent updates safe.
The architecture is cloud-native throughout: Go gRPC microservices with Protocol Buffer APIs for auth, vendor, and influencer domains—type-safe from backend to the React 18 TypeScript frontend via gRPC-Web—deployed on GKE with ArgoCD GitOps, Cloud Build CI/CD, and multi-architecture images. JWT authentication with Google OAuth secures both sides of the market.
Full campaign lifecycle
Creation, influencer discovery, offer negotiation, content delivery, and approval run as structured workflows instead of DM threads and email chains.
Automated payments
Stripe integration handles payouts automatically on campaign completion, replacing manual invoicing and wire-transfer delays.
Type-safe API contracts
Protocol Buffers define every API once, generating consistent types for the Go backend and React frontend—contract drift between teams becomes impossible.
GitOps cloud-native operations
Kubernetes on GKE with ArgoCD and Cloud Build gives the platform auto-scaling, reproducible deployments, and multi-architecture support.
How It Works in Practice
A consumer brand launching a product campaign with a dozen creators it has never worked with before.
- 1
Create and discover
The brand defines the campaign and browses creator profiles in-platform—no cold DMs, no agency shortlist fees.
- 2
Negotiate offers
Structured offer workflows carry terms, counters, and acceptances for each creator, with Twilio messaging handling the conversation alongside.
- 3
Review content
Creators deliver content through the platform for approval, keeping versions, feedback, and sign-off in one place.
- 4
Pay automatically
On approval, Stripe processes payouts without an invoice being written—and both sides keep a complete record of the engagement.
Engineering Approach
Disintermediate with software
The 30-50% agency fee is the cost of coordination—encoding discovery, negotiation, and settlement as platform workflows removes the middleman and the fee together.
Contracts before code
Protocol Buffer definitions as the single source of API truth kept a two-sided product with two frontend audiences consistent as it grew.
Concurrency handled honestly
Optimistic concurrency control on offers and campaign state prevents the double-update bugs that plague marketplaces where both sides edit the same records.
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