The constraint
A freelance marketplace needs trust before it has scale. We could not bootstrap reviews from fake users, post invented testimonials, or backfill a reputation graph from scraped public data without consent. Every shortcut competitors use was off the table.
What we did instead
- Built a real double-entry ledger (
backend/ledger/) so every cent that moves on the platform has two journal entries. Auditable on day one. - Required verified KYC/KYB before payouts. No anonymous withdrawal paths.
- Shipped opt-in reputation imports from Upwork, Fiverr, GitHub, and Freelancer.com with cryptographic proof-of-ownership (token paste or OAuth callback).
- Made the case studies page itself honest: empty until real customers consent — this entry is our own engineering story.
Outcomes (verifiable in the codebase)
- 162 product features delivered against the public spec (see
FEATURE_STATUS_MATRIX.md). - 6994 backend tests passing on every commit; 291 frontend tests in Vitest.
- 322 routes built and reachable; 2,894 API endpoints documented via drf-spectacular OpenAPI schema.
What we would do differently
Move autonomous /loop iterations into staging earlier. Local-only verification is fast but misses container/network failure modes.