Overview

Client: 1v9.gg
Project Duration: August 2023 – October 2025
Role: Founder, Product Designer, Full-Stack Developer, Technical Lead

The Challenge

The project began in August 2023 after being contacted by a gaming influencer looking for a custom website. During our market research, we analyzed the leading competitors in the League of Legends coaching and boosting space.

One trend became immediately clear: affiliate marketing was largely underutilized. Most competitors focused almost entirely on paid advertising or organic search, leaving a significant opportunity for creators and influencers.

Our goal was to build a platform that was designed around affiliate marketing from day one, making affiliate content, tracking, and promotion a core part of the product instead of an afterthought.

Research & Strategy

Before writing a single line of code, we researched:

• Existing competitors and their business models

• Affiliate marketing opportunities within gaming

• User purchasing behaviour

• SEO opportunities within the niche

• Creator and influencer marketing strategies

This research helped shape a platform that differentiated itself by making affiliates one of the primary growth channels.

From Niche Website to Marketplace

As the business grew, so did its ambitions.

What started as a website for a single game and a limited number of services evolved into a multi-game marketplace supporting numerous products and hundreds of freelancers.

This required rebuilding large parts of the platform.

The original architecture was designed around individual products. To support long-term growth, the system was restructured into a scalable marketplace capable of handling:

• Multiple games

• Multiple service categories

• Hundreds of active freelancers

• Internal employees

• Customer support

• Financial reporting

• Operational management

Rather than continuing to patch the original system, I redesigned the architecture to support future expansion while remaining easy to maintain.

Internal Operations Platform

One of the biggest challenges wasn't the customer-facing website—it was building the internal systems required to run the business efficiently.

I designed and developed:

• A queue-based workflow system for freelancers

• Moderator dashboard

• Administrator panel

• Employee management tools

• Order management system

• Customer support workflows

• Sales reporting

• Accounting exports for tax handling

• Permission and role management

These tools enabled the company to efficiently manage:

• 300+ freelancers

• 5 internal employees

• Thousands of customer orders

• Multiple product categories

Performance & Scalability

The entire platform was hand-coded before AI-assisted development became common.

Development took approximately one year and focused heavily on:

• Clean architecture

• Scalability

• Maintainability

• Performance

• SEO optimization

Building the project from the ground up allowed every system to be tailored specifically to the business instead of relying on generic marketplace software.

Results

The platform has achieved:

• Over $1,000,000 in sales

• More than 200 million visitors across its content ecosystem

• Hundreds of active freelancers managed through the platform

• A scalable marketplace supporting multiple games and services

• Strong growth driven by SEO, affiliate marketing, blogs, and social media

My Role

I was involved throughout every stage of the project, from initial research and design to development, scaling, and day-to-day operations.

Working closely with every part of the business gave me firsthand insight into how each department depends on technology. This included:

• Product strategy

• UX/UI design

• Full-stack development

• SEO

• Affiliate marketing

• Marketplace architecture

• Automation

• Operations

• Team workflows

• Scaling infrastructure

The experience reinforced that successful software is about more than writing code. It requires understanding the needs of customers, employees, freelancers, marketers, accountants, and administrators—and building systems that enable them to work together efficiently.