Motivators

Motivators is a platform where you buy personalised video messages from well-known people, with ticket sales running alongside. We designed and built it from zero, because there simply was no ready-made system for this on the market. And that's what makes it a good story: what do you do when your product doesn't fit any webshop template at all?

Why there was no ready-made answer

A video message is not a product in the webshop sense. It's not in stock, you can't return it, and it doesn't even exist until somebody makes it. The order is really a request: this person, for that person, for this occasion, with these words. That request has to reach the right person, wait until it's made, get back to the buyer, and the money has to be handled sensibly in between, because it's only earned once the video actually exists. When the process is the product, you build the system around the process.

2 lines of business, one system

Alongside the videos there are tickets, so the same system holds an instant digital product and a dated admission with a finite count. The 2 lines behave completely differently, and yet the same user buys them in the same basket. Which is why under the hood Motivators is closer to a business management system than to a webshop: people, orders, states, settlement and events, with the shopfront as the visible tip of it. It's the same family of problems our Le Bistroy platform lives in.

The wait is part of the product

What I carry from this project into everything since: when making the product takes human work, the system's most important job is not selling, it's keeping the buyer in the loop. Request received, accepted, ready in roughly this long. Skip that and they will write to you, and from then on every order ships with a support conversation attached. The other lesson: if you sell two kinds of thing, don't force them into one shape. Share what's genuinely shared (the basket, the payment) and let everything else work its own way. :)