Influencer Marketing / Creator Economy / Marketing Technology

Brands running influencer campaigns and creators looking to be booked both face a fragmented process: spreadsheets, cold DMs, outdated media kits, and no shared source of truth on pricing or performance. The Creator Match was built as a marketplace where brands can search, filter, and reach out to creators directly, while creators manage one profile containing their platforms, content categories, and per-format rates, visible to every brand looking for a fit.

The client needed one consistent, trustworthy marketplace where a brand could evaluate a creator's fit — platform, category, pricing, and audience signal — in one place, instead of four different screens that looked like four different, half-finished products.

• Give brands one searchable, filterable directory of creators by platform and content category
• Let creators manage a single profile with their platforms, categories, and per-format rates (reel, story, live)
• Provide an AI Bot that turns a short guided conversation into a matched creator shortlist
• Provide Live AI Search that pulls fresh, ranked posts and stats for a platform and category on demand
• Surface engagement and sentiment signals per platform so brands can judge audience fit before reaching out
• Present every card and profile consistently and gracefully, with or without a real photo, in light and dark mode
• Replace remaining placeholder/template content (footer, legal pages) with real, on-brand pages

Success criteria

We rebuilt the existing React and Laravel marketplace around one consistent design system and added the AI-assisted discovery experience — the AI Bot and Live AI Search — that make the marketplace useful as a discovery platform. A single brand palette drives every button, input, and heading through the MUI theme rather than dozens of hardcoded hex values; one reusable card pattern is shared across the dashboard, search results, AI Bot, and Live Search; and the Laravel API's sentiment and rating pipeline was audited to determine why real data was not reaching the screen.

Key capabilities

The platform is a decoupled application: a React single-page app (Create React App, MUI, React Router) consuming a Laravel REST API. The API owns authentication, brand and creator profile data, search, and an AI-assisted layer that syncs per-platform stats and sentiment from external sources.

The redesign replaced four mismatched visual styles and a template-default footer with one consistent, theme-driven product, and gave the AI-assisted discovery features a shared visual home.

• Four separate, mismatched color schemes across different screens, some hardcoded as hex values that also broke dark mode
• A third, independently-built duplicate creator card in the AI Bot results panel, with real bugs including an oversized card and a dead image fallback path
• A footer left over from the underlying UI template, quietly linking out to a different company's real social accounts
• A missing-image case with no visual treatment at all, rendering a broken image icon
• A reported missing-sentiment-data issue that initially looked like a missing backend feature, but was actually already-returned data plus a silently-failing external AI call

For styling drift, every color decision was moved into one MUI theme (palette plus button and input customizations), so every screen inherited the same brand gradient automatically, including pages not touched directly. For the duplicate creator card, the second implementation was removed and the shared card component was reused everywhere a creator needs to be shown. For the footer, placeholder links and copy were replaced with real pages backed by actual routes. For missing images, cards and profile headers now fall back to a solid brand-gradient cover and an avatar showing the creator's initial rather than a broken image icon. For the sentiment gap, the exact code path was traced through the Laravel service, an Artisan command, and finally a raw HTTP call to the real OpenAI endpoint until the actual cause — an invalid API key returning a text/plain error that a client library mishandled — was confirmed, and the true cost and scope of a fix were reported before running anything against a real, billed API.

• Session-based authentication with role separation between brand and creator accounts
• Client-side validation of uploaded profile and cover images before submission
• Sentiment and engagement data sourced from official or licensed APIs (the YouTube Data API) and a scraping service for other platforms, never fabricated or estimated on the client
• Backfill and resync operations scoped deliberately by platform and specific record rather than blanket re-processing, to control real external API cost
• No destructive action taken against production data; any resync was scoped to exactly the affected rows and confirmed before executing
• The platform assists brands and creators in finding each other; it does not itself verify creator identity, negotiate rates, or process payments — those remain a direct conversation between the two parties

• A real creator-rating feature — the rating field already exists in the database; only the capture flow is missing
• Automated visual regression testing to catch styling drift going forward the way it accumulated before this project
• Extending sentiment and engagement display into brand/creator profile analytics, beyond individual platform cards
• A CI-driven build and redeploy pipeline on top of the current pm2-based deployment

• A theme-first approach to visual consistency — one palette change correctly cascades to screens never directly touched, instead of a per-page patch job
• Willingness to investigate root cause across the full stack — frontend, backend service, and a live third-party API — rather than stopping at the first plausible explanation
• Cost-aware handling of real, billed external services — scoping exactly which records to resync and checking with the client before spending real API budget
• Attention to the details that make a product feel finished — graceful fallbacks for missing data, no leftover template boilerplate, and dark mode that actually works
• Full-stack delivery across the React frontend and the Laravel API it depends on

Brands and creators on The Creator Match needed one consistent, trustworthy place to discover, evaluate, and reach out to each other — not four different visual styles bolted together with placeholder content still showing through. This project rebuilt the product around a single design system, gave the AI-assisted discovery features (AI Bot and Live AI Search) a home consistent with the rest of the app, and replaced guesswork about missing data with a verified, root-caused answer. The result is a marketplace that looks and behaves like one product, with a clear, honest account of what still needs real data behind it.