I · The brief
The team ran a six-figure SEO link-building business out of one shared spreadsheet — orders, publishers, payouts, content review, all in the same tabs. Growing meant breaking it. They asked us to replace the spreadsheet without breaking the trust the SEOs and publishers had built around it.
II · What we built
- —A two-sided marketplace with publisher domain listings and buyer order flow.
- —Order routing that matches briefs to publishers by topic, language, and DA.
- —An editorial review queue with comment threads and revision history.
- —A payout engine for publishers, monthly and on demand.
- —A migration that ran the spreadsheet and the platform side-by-side for six weeks before cutover.
"First time the pipeline doesn't live in my spreadsheet."
III · What changed
−85%
manual ops per order
3.4×
orders processed monthly
0
spreadsheets after cutover
IV · What we'd do differently
We'd build the editorial review queue before order routing. Trust lived in review — buyers wanted to see drafts move through stages — and we tackled routing first because it felt like the harder problem. Routing without review just meant orders moved faster into a bottleneck.