Shopify, but for selling services
Service marketplace for creators with audiences. Deep competitive UX analysis and a database lesson.
Gumroad lets creators sell products to their audience, but it still doesn't support selling services. Gigpop was meant to fill that gap — a marketplace where creators with existing audiences (coaches, music producers, consultants) could sell services directly to their fans. Think Fiverr, but the Shopify model: you bring your own audience.
Before designing anything, I spent hours in Figma studying how Fiverr and Upwork structure their flows — gig creation, order questions, messaging, quote requests. Breaking down what they'd already solved so I wasn't reinventing things that didn't need reinventing.
I built out the backend with a GraphQL API and got auth, messaging, gig management, and a custom quote request system working. The one mistake was choosing FaunaDB as the database — I wanted to experiment with a serverless database, and they later shut down entirely. Lesson learned: the database is the one thing you probably don't want to get experimental with.
