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Case study
A creator agency, rebuilt from the spreadsheet up
Software Development
Digital Infrastructure
Strategy
MODERNSPEAK manages creators for some of the world’s best-known brands. We took their back office from a scrappy Airtable MVP to a bespoke, production-grade platform, and became their long-term technical partner. It’s our first true top-to-bottom software product, built from nothing but a foundation of our own.
Detail
The brief
MODERNSPEAK is a boutique creator-management agency, the middleman between a roster of creators and the globally recognised brands that want to work with them. They build campaigns, broker deals and deliver content all over the world.
Behind the scenes, that meant a mounting administrative load: invoicing, commissions, taxes, and keeping their database, their staff, their creators and their accounting in Xero all in perfect alignment. As the roster grew, the back office strained. They needed the operation to scale as gracefully as the reputation.
Field note
The MVP that proved it
We started where every good build should: with the cheapest version that could possibly work. We modelled MODERNSPEAK’s entire operation in Airtable, covering creators, brands, campaigns and invoicing, and put it in front of the team.
It worked. It validated every process and ran the business for a real stretch. But a proven MVP also reveals its own ceiling. Airtable charged by the seat, so the cost climbed with every new hire. And its interfaces fought us on the details that mattered most. You couldn’t raise multiple invoices in one pass, tax logic was awkward, and we were forever bending the business to fit a proprietary platform instead of the other way around.
Field note
Going fully bespoke
With the processes proven, we went back to MODERNSPEAK with a proposal: take everything we’d learned and rebuild it bespoke, with no ceiling. A Supabase back end, a Next.js front end, and the freedom to do exactly what the business needed.
We migrated every record out of Airtable, tens of thousands of them, and carried the team’s workflows across intact, then improved them across the board. None of it began from a blank repo. It sits on the Paper Crane OS, our own operating system, which hands every build robust functionality (auth, permissions, real-time, exports, integrations) on day one. That’s why even a first version arrives sturdy.
Field note
Invoicing, finally on their terms
The one thing Airtable couldn’t do became a single button. Staff now select a whole batch of campaigns and generate every invoice at once, with province-aware tax applied automatically, agency commission split on issue, and the lot synced two ways with Xero so the books are never out of step.
What used to be a careful, manual chore is now a handful of clicks, with a clean administrator’s-eye view over all of it.
Field note
Visibility, by default
Much of an agency’s value is invisible, the pitches sent, the calls booked, the deals nudged forward in the inbox. We integrated MODERNSPEAK’s CRM, Streak, so all of that activity flows into the platform automatically and rolls up into a weekly report.
Then we gave the roster their own door. The platform quietly proves the fee is being earned, and, as you’ll see next, lets every creator check in for themselves.
Field note
From vibe-coded to production
Here’s something we’re happy to say out loud: MODERNSPEAK’s founder vibe-coded a prototype. Like a lot of founders now, she used AI tools to build a working sketch of the features she wanted: pitch generators, trip planners, ways to spin up documents and emails in the team’s own voice.
Those prototypes are a gift. They’re rarely production-ready on the full-stack, security or execution front, but they communicate intent better than any brief or workshop could: the user flows, the design, the feel. It’s product-development effort the client has already invested, which means less discovery, fewer rounds of questions, and a faster, cheaper path to the real thing.
We took that intent and built it properly, then grounded it in data the platform already held. Because the system already knows every creator’s niche, audience and history, the AI never starts from a blank page; it drafts in the team’s voice, on top of the agency’s own knowledge. The result is a scalable, genuinely useful product, one we’re now in conversations to license to other agencies.
Measured outcomes
What it adds up to
No vanity metrics, just the shape of the thing we built.
- 1
- bespoke operating system, in place of a stack of rented SaaS
- 0
- per-seat fees, and it scales without charging for every new hire
- 18
- AI desk tools, each grounded in the agency’s own data
- 2-way
- Xero sync keeping books, tax and commission in lockstep
- Tens of thousands
- of records migrated from Airtable without losing a workflow
01
02
03
04
05
In closing
A partner, not a project
MODERNSPEAK’s platform is in production today, out in the world, performing, and still growing. We’re now exploring licensing it to other agencies, turning one bespoke build into a product.
That’s the point of how we work. We start deeper, on our own operating system, so even a first version is robust. We build real, production-grade software our clients own outright, free of per-seat pricing and vendor moats, and we stay on as a long-term technical partner. Less time on manual admin, more time on the work that actually grows the business.
