Surefire Fundraising
As QueueOne — built from nothing, still maintained
The business did not exist before the platform went live. That is the whole brief: it had to work from the first day, because there was no manual process to fall back to.
- Laravel
- Stripe
- Mailgun
- PHP
Context
An early-stage business here in Edmonton, and the strongest version of the reliability argument I can make — they did not have an existing operation that the software improved. The company started on top of the platform. They own it and the intellectual property in it, so this page stays at the level of what it is built from rather than how it works.
The problem
When a business is founded on a platform rather than migrated onto one, there is no fallback. There is no previous spreadsheet, no manual process someone remembers, no way to keep trading while the software is down. Day one of the business is day one of the system being load-bearing.
That inverts the usual risk conversation. The question is not whether the software is better than what they had — it is whether the software is dependable enough to build a company on, on the day it ships.
What I built
- A Laravel application, from nothing
- Designed, built and put into production for a client with no existing system to extend and no internal engineering.
- Catalog and checkout on Stripe
- Product catalog and payment handling, where money movement is the part that has to be right every time rather than most of the time.
- An admin portal with reporting
- So the people running the business can answer their own questions rather than asking me.
- Transactional email through Mailgun
- Automated messages confirming that something happened, which are as load-bearing as the transaction itself.
Outcome
The business launched on the platform and runs on it day to day. Years on, I am still the person who maintains it — currently modernizing and stabilizing it and extending the reporting. It is the only named local client in this portfolio, and they were good enough to let me point at it.
Sound like something you have?
More work
- KeystoneOS
Idempotent webhook ingestion keyed on provider event IDs, anonymous-to-identified event backfill, CREA RESO OData sync, and pgvector semantic search over listings.
- A major Canadian airline
Booking, seat maps, flight search and automated baggage handling, integrated against airline reservation systems under a contractual throughput SLA.
- What's The Deal
A Flutter app on the App Store and Google Play using location, geofencing, maps and push, with RAG-based search and a vector recommender behind it.