Varmply
varmply.com ↗A creator-brand marketplace for the Nigerian music economy — linking artists to sponsorships with verified performance and escrow payouts.
The brief
Nigerian music is having a global moment. Ayra Starr sells out London, Burna Boy headlines Coachella. But most working artists, the ones with real audiences and real influence, still negotiate brand deals over WhatsApp. No contracts, no metrics, no guarantee anyone gets paid.
Varmply set out to give that economy the infrastructure it never had: a marketplace where sponsors and creators transact with money held safely and performance proven rather than promised. I owned it end to end, design and build, from the first wireframe to the deployed product.
The problem
Underneath every WhatsApp deal is the same two-sided trust gap. Three problems kept surfacing.
Sponsors pay upfront and can't verify what they got.
Brands wire money before anything ships, then have no recourse when creators ghost, post late, or deliver content that misses the brief. No standard contract, no neutral party holding either side to the deal.
Creators do the work and still don't get paid.
Payment runs on goodwill. A creator delivers, then waits, chases, and often eats the loss. After enough burns, the best creators stop trusting first-time sponsors at all.
Nobody can agree on what a campaign achieved.
Reach and engagement get inflated with cropped screenshots. Brands can't pull verified numbers and creators can't prove theirs are real, so every post-campaign conversation becomes a standoff.
The solution
Two mechanisms close the gap. Everything else in the product is built around them.
A sponsor funds the campaign before any creator applies, and the budget sits locked in escrow. Creators see the funds exist before they commit a minute of work, so trust no longer rides on a stranger's goodwill. Money releases only when the agreed terms are met.
Varmply connects to TikTok and Instagram over OAuth and pulls performance straight from the platform. No self-reported screenshots, no inflated numbers. The data both sides see is the same data that triggers payout.
From there the product splits cleanly: a marketing site that has to credentialize a product in a market with no category yet, and a web app where sponsors run campaigns and creators get paid.
Validating the approach
I didn't arrive at escrow and verified metrics from the outside. I have spent time close to this scene, and I took the problem straight to the people living it: creators chasing payments that never landed, and sponsors burned by deals that went nowhere.
The same story came back every time. Creators wanted to know the money was real before they posted. Sponsors wanted proof before they paid. Both kept describing the same missing middle. Escrow and verified metrics were not a guess at what might help, they were the two things people named back to me in their own words.
That is also why the design leads with trust signals instead of feature lists. The objection to clear was never what the product does, it was why anyone should believe it.
Design breakdown
Every block below is the live product, embedded straight from the deployed site: the marketing site first, then the auth and onboarding flows, then the web app itself.
Purple full-bleed hero with two CTAs — one for sponsors, one for creators — so both audiences self-select at entry. The glass panel holds a portrait of a real artist rather than a device mockup, making the product feel like it's already in use. Floating platform pills (Instagram reach, TikTok views) ground the abstract pitch in the numbers creators actually track.
Four-step sponsor journey in editorial bento cards. Ghost step numbers sit behind each card as background depth — borrowed from print design to add hierarchy without visual noise. Phone mockups inside each card visualise the flow without relying on real screenshots.
Creator-facing value prop — contrasts the informal DM economy (no contracts, no accountability) with Varmply's structured campaign flow. Positioned before any feature detail so the problem lands before the solution.
A masonry grid of real creator thumbnails tied to active campaigns. The goal was to signal a live creator pool to sponsors before the platform fully launches — presence before proof.
Creator community section anchored in the Nigerian music economy — Ayra Starr, Rema, Davido named explicitly. Specificity was a deliberate choice: a generic 'creator economy' framing wouldn't signal who this is actually built for.
Six testimonial cards split by role — creators and sponsors — in tinted editorial frames. Auto-scroll signals community momentum without requiring any interaction. For a pre-launch product, the testimonials do the job of making the platform feel inhabited.
GSAP curtain reveal — the footer stays fixed beneath the page and lifts into view as the last section scrolls away. Gives the site a cinematic close that matches the ambition of the product rather than just stopping.
Campaign stat cards in editorial poster format. The large headline numbers — 148K reach, 9.1% engagement — pull the eye before any explanatory copy. Proof before pitch: the numbers are the argument, the body copy is the footnote.
The trust anchor of the whole site — ₦0 lost to non-performance as the hero stat. The asymmetric layout (large feature card + two stacked) breaks down lock → validate → return in one scan. Payment uncertainty is the primary sponsor objection; this section answers it before they ask.
Creator-side step breakdown: browse campaigns, apply, post content, get paid. Mirrors the sponsor flow in structure but reframes every step around the creator's actions and incentives. Phone mockups inside each card show the exact screen they'll see.
Email + password entry with Google OAuth. The screen links directly to Sign In for returning users — no separate page needed. Single-screen entry, no multi-step friction before role selection.
Role selection is the first decision — creator or sponsor. Each choice routes to a different setup path. Clicking through the screens mirrors how a real user would move: role → profile → platform connection (creator) or org setup (sponsor). The split keeps onboarding specific to what each role actually needs.
The sponsor's primary view: campaign grid, budget distribution ladder, and a 30-day performance chart. Stat tiles are lifetime figures — a sponsor always knows their total reach and creators worked with at a glance.
The sponsor campaign workspace: tabbed by state (Active, Draft, Completed, Archived). Each card shows creator slot fill rate, budget utilisation, and days remaining — the three numbers a sponsor actually checks mid-campaign.
Aggregate performance across all campaigns: total impressions, engagement, and distributed budget over a selectable time window. Designed so a sponsor can answer 'is this working?' without opening individual campaigns.
The full 4-step campaign creation flow in one interactive embed. Step 1 collects identity (name, artist, cover). Step 2 sets content rules (platform, hashtags, format). Step 3 shows a live budget projection — estimated impressions and engagement update as the number changes. Step 4 is the final review before escrow is funded and the campaign goes live.
The creator's home: earnings, pending payout, active campaigns, and a performance chart. Kept deliberately minimal — creators are on mobile, so the sidebar collapses and the stats stack vertically.
Where creators discover campaigns. Three filter tabs (All, Open now, Available to me) surface the right campaigns for each creator's platform and audience. Eligibility is checked server-side so creators never waste an application.
The creator's financial layer: available balance, tracking earnings (locked until campaign verifies), pending payout, and transaction history. The three-bucket breakdown makes the escrow model legible — creators know exactly why money isn't immediately withdrawable.
Conclusion & next steps
The result is the product you just scrolled through: a complete, deployed creator-brand marketplace, designed and built end to end. Marketing site, authentication, onboarding for both roles, and a working web app for running campaigns and tracking payouts. Every screen here is the real thing running live, not a mockup.
Carrying it from a blank canvas to something live and coherent, owning both the design and the code, is the part I am proudest of. Varmply is pre-launch, opening through a waitlist, and the work now shifts from building the product to proving the loop with real money and real campaigns.
Open the waitlist to a first cohort
Bring on an initial set of creators and sponsors so the marketplace has both sides live from day one, not just one half waiting on the other.
Prove the escrow-to-payout loop end to end
Run real money through the full cycle: fund, lock, verify, release. The mechanism is designed and built; the next milestone is watching it hold under actual deals.
Harden verification on live platform data
Tune the TikTok and Instagram integration against real performance numbers, where the edge cases the design cannot predict will surface.
Build decisions
May 23, 2026
Embeds load in a sliding window, not all at once
The case study embeds the live product across more than twenty iframes. Mounting them all at once hammered both origins and made the page crawl. The first fix mounted each embed on its own as it neared the viewport, but that reloaded every one from cold each time you scrolled back to it. Replaced both with a shared manager that keeps only the six embeds nearest the viewport live, biased ahead in the scroll direction so the next ones warm up before you arrive. Keeping every iframe mounted was considered and rejected for the memory cost, and a fixed first-six window was rejected for ignoring where the reader actually is.
May 23, 2026
Closing on conclusion and next steps, before the decisions log
The case study used to just stop after the screens. Added a closing section that states the outcome plainly, the product is built and deployed, then lays out the honest next steps toward launch: open the waitlist, prove the escrow-to-payout loop with real money, harden verification on live data. Placed it ahead of the build-decisions timeline so the narrative resolves first and the decisions log reads as the appendix it is. Inventing launch metrics was considered and rejected, the product is pre-launch and saying so is more credible than a fabricated number.
May 22, 2026
Auth and onboarding shown through the product's own navigation
The first cut wrapped auth and onboarding in custom tab switchers so you could jump between screens inside the case study. But the product already carries that movement — the sign-up screen links to sign-in, and onboarding steps forward on its own Next buttons. The switcher was the case study narrating over the product instead of letting it run. Each flow collapsed to a single embed that starts at the real entry point — sign-up, and role selection — and lets the built-in navigation do the rest. A multi-tab strip was considered and cut for duplicating affordances the product already has.
May 22, 2026
Case study restructured into one coherent arc
The page had a loose intro that did not line up with the problem section added later, so the narrative read in fragments. Rebuilt it as a single arc: brief, problem, solution, how the approach was validated, the live screens as proof, then a conclusion with next steps. An earlier signal/response split inside each problem card was cut, and the validation it implied now lives in its own honest section grounded in lived experience and conversations with creators and sponsors rather than fabricated market data.