A three-sided marketplace connecting social-media creators with crowdfunding sellers: referral links, commission tracking, analytics. I was solo everything: UX, product, and project manager. The flow I designed never changed. Everything around it nearly burned the project down.
RockitBoost connects influencers with sellers on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Amazon, generating referral links creators use to promote products and earn commissions. Simple concept. But all the commission tracking, click attribution, and analytics was being done by hand.
So the problem was two-fold: make it dead simple for influencers to get links and track earnings, and dead simple for sellers to find influencers and boost sales. I researched Kickstarter itself and saw what we were really building, "Kickstarter for Kickstarter": the same core act, generate a referral link, with a layer of commission tracking and analytics on top.
I wireframed every major flow (sign-ups for all three roles, analytics dashboards, the product marketplace) and presented them to the client directly. He loved them. We never pivoted; they stayed exactly as I defined them.
Sign up, browse available products, get referral links, track commissions: clicks, engagement, earnings.
Sign up, list a product, track analytics: influencers who picked it up, referral links generated, clicks, engagement, revenue.
Like influencers, with an extra layer: agencies earn commission and distribute percentages to affiliated influencers. More resources, smaller individual cut.
The client disliked the dev team's first UI and brought in his own designer, who then changed colors, layouts, and fonts again, and again, and a third time. Each "quick change" was an entire development cycle, redone.
The devs were furious: every redesign meant redoing finished work. The dev lead started calling my cell at midnight, a number I'd given him strictly for emergencies; apparently the designer qualified. Eventually I had the hard conversation with the client about budget: multiple full redesigns aren't aesthetic tweaks, they're development cycles happening over and over. My CEO reinforced it, the client agreed to hold the direction steady, and the redesigns stopped.
And the devs came back with bad news: tracking clicks and purchases across Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Amazon was "not possible without API integrations", and none of those platforms handed out public API access.
I respect developers. But when someone says something is impossible, I go look. I dug through how Kickstarter and Indiegogo handle referral tracking themselves (knowledge bases, support docs) and found it wasn't an API problem at all. It was a Google Analytics thing.
Users authorize Google Analytics.
Google Analytics tracks clicks and purchases on the linked platforms.
That data gets passed to our app.
We calculate commissions on our end. Bam. Problem solved.
The devs didn't believe me at first, so I sent them the Google Analytics articles and Kickstarter's knowledge base on Intercom. Eventually they saw it: it actually was possible. The project was saved.