Case study · Content platform

Humble

A platform giving founders vetted advice, mental-health resources and discounted tools, built for three audiences at once, from MVP.

Beta

Engagement
Full-stack development partner
Platforms
Web application
Role
Engineering, within a multi-team delivery
Stage
Beta Verify before publishing
The Humble platform: the curated content feed mixing video, podcast and article formats, the Humble Studio creator dashboard, and the discounted SaaS tools marketplace.
Industry
Content and entertainment
Users
Consumers, creators, admins
Formats
Video, podcast, article
Platforms
Web
Role
Development partner
Status
Beta

01The business situation

Founders do not need more content. They need less, better chosen.

Advice aimed at entrepreneurs is abundant and mostly noise, and the toll that noise takes is rarely acknowledged. Humble set out to do three things at once: curate advice actually worth reading, treat mental health as a first-class part of the founder experience rather than a footnote, and make the tools a young company needs affordable. We built it as the engineering half of a three-way collaboration: 99x Technologies designed the web application, and the Humble team steered both.

Core challenge

Serve consumers, creators and administrators from one platform without the product becoming three products stitched together.

Before

Advice, wellbeing and tooling scattered across the web

  • Unvetted Advice
  • Scattered Resources
  • Full-price Tools
  • No Curation

After

One curated place, built for three kinds of user

  • Consumer
  • Creator
  • Admin
  • Marketplace

Humble Platform

02The system at a glance

One platform. Four connected experiences.

  • Content Experience Curated video, audio and writing
  • Humble Studio Creator publishing and performance
  • Admin Panel Users, creators and content
  • Tools Marketplace Discounted SaaS for founders
Core PlatformMonolithic, cloud-hosted and productised
  • Content Publishing
  • Multi-format Media
  • Creator Onboarding
  • Performance Analytics
  • Marketplace Offers
  • Email & Notifications

03Workflow 01

One library, three formats, one standard.

A consumer meets the platform as a single curated library. Whether something arrives as a video, a podcast or an article is a matter of format, not of where it lives.

Image placeholder The consumer content experience: a curated feed mixing video, podcast and article cards, with a piece of long-form content open and its related items alongside. assets/portfolio/humble/workflow-content.png · 16 / 11
  • Format is not a siloVideo, audio and writing sit in the same library rather than in three separate sections.
  • Curated, not aggregatedContent is admitted deliberately, which is the whole proposition rather than a feature.
  • Wellbeing alongside adviceMental-health resources sit next to business content rather than in a separate corner.

04Workflow 02

Creators need to see whether it landed.

A creator is onboarded by an administrator, publishes in whichever format suits the material, and then gets to see how it performed, in a dashboard of their own, not a monthly email.

  1. 1Onboarded by admin

    Image placeholder Admin onboarding a new creator: their profile, permitted formats and publishing access. assets/portfolio/humble/step-onboard.png · 1 / 2.04

  2. 2Publish any format

    Image placeholder Creator composing a piece in Humble Studio, with the choice of video, podcast or article and the fields each format needs. assets/portfolio/humble/step-publish.png · 1 / 2.04

  3. 3See it perform

    Image placeholder Humble Studio performance dashboard: a creator’s published pieces with their engagement over time. assets/portfolio/humble/step-studio.png · 1 / 2.04

05Workflow 03

The marketplace is part of the value, not an advert.

Alongside the content sits a set of discounted offers on the SaaS products a young company actually runs on, purchasable in the platform rather than linked away.

  • Offers, not affiliate linksDiscounts on operational tools are part of what membership buys.
  • Bought in the platformA member can act on an offer without leaving for a third-party checkout.
  • Administered centrallyOffers, creators and content are all managed from the same admin surface.
Image placeholder The tools marketplace: SaaS product cards with their discounted offers for members, a product detail view, and the admin controls for managing offers. assets/portfolio/humble/marketplace.png · 16 / 10
Image placeholder Compact admin view: pending creators, recently published content and the moderation queue. assets/portfolio/humble/admin-mobile.png · 1 / 2.04

06Engineering behind the product

The system behind three audiences.

A deliberately conventional architecture, chosen so effort could go into the product rather than into operating it.

  • Monolithic by choice

    A single well-structured application was the right shape for a beta product, keeping deployment and reasoning simple.

  • Three-role permission model

    Consumers, creators and administrators have distinct capabilities against the same content records.

  • Multi-format content model

    Video, podcast and article are variants of one content entity rather than three parallel systems.

  • Creator analytics

    Engagement is aggregated per creator and surfaced in a dedicated dashboard.

  • Queue and scheduled work

    A Redis queue with Celery-run cron jobs handles processing that should not happen inside a request.

  • Marketplace integration

    Discounted SaaS offers are modelled as purchasable items within the platform.

    Verify before publishing

  • Transactional email

    Notification and transactional mail run through AWS SES.

07Technical architecture

Under the hood

A deliberately monolithic Django application with a Nuxt front end, chosen so effort went into the product rather than into operating it.

Backend

  • Django
  • Django REST Framework
  • Monolithic architecture

Frontend

  • Nuxt.js
  • Tailwind CSS

Async

  • Redis
  • Celery

Cloud & serving

  • AWS EC2
  • Nginx
  • Gunicorn
  • supervisor

Services

  • AWS SES (email)

Delivery tooling

  • Jira
  • Confluence

08Delivery journey

How the platform was delivered.

  1. Requirements

    Gather scope with the client team

  2. Design

    Mock-ups by 99x Technologies, approved by Humble

  3. Test cases

    Document and agree expected behaviour

  4. Engineering

    Build features against approved designs

  5. Staging

    Unit, integration and regression testing

  6. UAT

    Acceptance testing before release

  7. Production

    Ship, then iterate in beta

The product is in beta with creators being onboarded. Engagement dates and durations are withheld until confirmed. Verify before publishing

09Where it stands today

What the platform brings together

  • Curated content across video, podcast and article
  • Mental-health resources alongside business advice
  • A creator publishing surface with its own analytics
  • Administrative control over creators and content
  • Discounted SaaS offers purchasable in-platform
  • A tested route from staging to production

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