Fansted

Fansted is a creator monetization platform I built for paid communities, subscriptions, and exclusive digital content in Ghana.

I led the product from idea to launch, covering product strategy, UX direction, engineering, infrastructure, payments, compliance, and early growth. The work stretched across the full product surface: creator dashboards, content systems, subscription flows, payment infrastructure, financial partner workflows, KYC/AML, identity checks, transaction risk handling, and creator acquisition.

The Product

Fansted gives creators a way to package, sell, and control access to their digital content.

Creators can launch content channels, publish exclusive material, create subscription plans, and manage their audience from a dedicated dashboard. Fans can subscribe, purchase access, and return to a library of creator content.

The product was designed around a practical Ghanaian creator workflow: help people turn attention into recurring revenue without forcing them to stitch together payments, files, pages, compliance, and subscriber management by hand.

What I Built

The core product includes:

• Public creator channels and creator profile pages
• Subscription plans for paid content access
• Checkout and subscription flows for fans
• Creator dashboards for revenue, subscribers, channels, and content
• Content systems for videos, downloads, courses, and series
• Subscriber libraries for accessing purchased or subscribed content
• Admin tooling for payments, users, channels, subscriptions, refunds, webhooks, and settlements
• Email, receipt, notification, and onboarding flows

The source code reflects a full production product rather than a prototype: protected creator workspaces, public marketing pages, admin operations, payment provider abstractions, scheduled jobs, storage policies, database migrations, and test infrastructure.

Payments And Financial Operations

Payments were one of the deepest parts of the product.

I integrated payment infrastructure and financial partner workflows across Hubtel and Paystack. The payment layer supports checkout sessions, transaction verification, payout accounts, subscription management, refunds, settlement sync, provider webhooks, receipts, and admin reconciliation flows.

The implementation includes a provider contract for payment operations, client-side checkout launch flows, server-side payment actions, cron jobs for operational checks, and admin dashboards for transaction and settlement visibility.

Compliance And Risk

Because Fansted handles creator earnings and paid access, compliance was not something I could leave as an afterthought.

I designed and implemented KYC/AML features and policies, including identity verification, creator payout gating, KYC status handling, risk logging, settlement holds, and release flows once verification requirements are met.

The product includes identity checks through a KYC provider layer, profile-level verification state, operations logging for verification outcomes, and settlement handling for creators who need to complete identity or payout requirements.

Creator Experience

The creator side was built to make monetization feel manageable.

A creator can set up a channel, define plans, upload content, attach content to plans, track subscribers, monitor revenue, and share their channel with an audience. The dashboard gives creators visibility into net income, active subscribers, best-performing channels, sales, and onboarding progress.

I also built marketing surfaces for different creator categories, including musicians, educators, artists, fitness coaches, fashion and beauty creators, and sports tipsters. That work supported creator acquisition and made the platform easier to explain to specific audiences.

Technical Highlights

• Built with Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Supabase
• Structured around public, protected, and admin application surfaces
• Uses provider abstractions for payments and KYC
• Supports Hubtel and Paystack payment workflows
• Includes creator channels, subscription plans, content access, and subscriber libraries
• Implements video, download, course, and series content models
• Includes settlements, refunds, receipts, webhooks, payout accounts, and admin reconciliation
• Uses Sanity-backed content for marketing, guides, legal, and editorial surfaces
• Includes operational logging, scheduled jobs, analytics, and testing infrastructure

My Role

I led the product end to end.

That meant deciding what the product should be, designing the creator and fan experience, building the application architecture, implementing the core product systems, integrating payments, designing compliance flows, setting up infrastructure, and leading early social growth and marketing.

Fansted is one of the clearest examples of how I work: product strategy and engineering together, with enough operational depth to turn an idea into something real.