Overview
Prodoktiv Studio is a full-stack agency platform I designed and engineered from scratch, and it does double duty as a client-facing portfolio and a fully operational business backend. It runs payment-gated digital products, an 8-stage kanban CRM, cold email sequences, content scheduling, and a real-time activity dashboard. This case study is a little unusual: I was the designer, the engineer, and the primary daily user, so every operational friction point turned into a design ticket I couldn't just ignore.
Full-stack digital agency platform with 18 admin pages, Paystack payments, email sequences, CRM pipeline, and 8 digital products shipped to 150+ customers.
The Challenge
Running a solo digital agency means covering sales, delivery, finance, and marketing yourself, usually across 11 disconnected tools. Leads lived in spreadsheets, invoices in one app, email outreach in another, content scheduling in a third, and product delivery happened through manually attached email files. Every context switch leaked time, and worse, it leaked leads: prospects went cold in untracked pipelines while buyers sat waiting hours for products that should have arrived instantly.
The challenge was designing a single operating system for the agency around two very different user groups. The operator needs dense, fast, keyboard-friendly admin tooling across CRM, invoicing, email sequences, and content. The customers need a polished storefront where discovering, paying for, and instantly receiving a digital product feels as trustworthy as any global platform, with Paystack handling the realities of Nigerian payments underneath it.
Business Goals
- 1Replace 11 disconnected tools with one platform, driving operational overhead down to near zero for a solo operator
- 2Turn portfolio visitors into product buyers through instant, payment-gated delivery
- 3Systematize lead generation and follow-up so no prospect goes cold in an untracked pipeline again
- 4Lay the foundation for a future white-label SaaS version of the same platform
User Needs
- 1Operator: see the entire business, pipeline, revenue, content, outreach, from one dashboard in under a minute each morning
- 2Operator: move leads through stages, send sequenced emails, and issue invoices, all without leaving the platform
- 3Customers: buy a digital product with a payment method they trust and receive it instantly
- 4Customers: browse work and products in a storefront polished enough to justify premium pricing
Key Findings
- 1The pre-platform workflow audit counted 11 tools in a typical agency week, with constant context-switching between them. This fragmentation cost was structural, not anecdotal
- 2Leads went cold mostly at the follow-up stage. Without automated sequences, a second or third touch simply never happened
- 3Customer feedback showed payment trust was the real conversion bottleneck: Nigerian buyers abandoned unfamiliar checkout flows but converted reliably through Paystack
- 4Manual product delivery created a fulfillment lag stretching up to several hours, which generated support messages and refund anxiety
- 5Studying tools like HubSpot, Notion, and Lemlist showed each one solved a single slice deeply while creating integration overhead no solo operator could realistically absorb
User Voices
"I paid but nothing arrived in my email yet. Can you confirm you saw the payment?"
"Honestly I almost did not complete the payment because the checkout page did not look like anything I recognized."
"By the time I remembered to follow up with that lead, they had already hired someone else. That one stung."
User Personas
Affinity Mapping · Key Themes
Fragmentation Cost
- 1Eleven tools meant constant context-switching and no single unified truth
- 2Each tool's monthly fee added up into real overhead for a solo operator
- 3Data trapped inside individual tools made even simple business questions slow to answer
The Follow-up Gap
- 1Deals died from silence, not rejection. A second touch just never happened
- 2Automated sequences turn follow-up from a discipline problem into infrastructure
- 3Pipeline visibility on its own creates accountability for stale leads
Checkout Trust
- 1Nigerian buyers convert through payment rails they recognize, Paystack chief among them
- 2Checkout polish reads as a proxy for whether the business is legitimate
- 3Instant fulfillment kills the did-my-payment-work anxiety spike before it starts
Operator Ergonomics
- 1Admin tooling needs to be dense and fast, since the operator lives in it every day
- 2A one-minute morning review of the whole business is the north-star flow to design toward
- 3Repetitive tasks, invoices, delivery, posting, need to run without the operator touching them
Empathy Map · Dasola Awoyemi (Operator)
User Journey Map
Information Architecture
Public Storefront
- 1Portfolio & case studies
- 2Product catalog
- 3Paystack checkout
- 4Customer accounts
CRM
- 18-stage kanban pipeline
- 2Lead profiles
- 3Interaction history
- 4Stage automations
Revenue
- 1Invoices & proposals
- 2Payment tracking
- 3Product sales analytics
Outreach
- 1Email sequences
- 2Campaign scheduling
- 3Deliverability monitoring
Content
- 1Post scheduler
- 2Content calendar
- 3Asset library
Operations
- 1Activity dashboard
- 2Customer management
- 3Platform settings
User Stories
Approaches Considered
Best-of-Breed Stack
Keep specialized tools (a CRM, an email platform, a storefront, a scheduler) and stitch them together with automation glue like Zapier.
Pros
- + No build time, and mature features already in each tool
- + Components stay swappable
Cons
- - Integration glue breaks silently, and often
- - Subscription costs compound across every tool
- - Still no single source of truth or unified experience
Unified Custom Platform
Design and build one platform owning the full loop, storefront, payments, CRM, sequences, invoicing, content, and dashboard, on Next.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL.
Pros
- + One source of truth, and zero context-switching
- + Every workflow designed specifically for this business
- + Becomes a white-label SaaS asset down the line
Cons
- - Four months of build investment upfront
- - Solo maintenance responsibility going forward
Storefront-Only MVP
Build just the payment-gated product storefront and keep running the rest of operations on existing tools.
Pros
- + Fastest possible revenue impact
- + Small, low-risk scope
Cons
- - The follow-up gap, the biggest leak of all, stays wide open
- - Operational fragmentation goes untouched
- - Defers the platform vision indefinitely
Design Approach
I designed Prodoktiv as two products sharing one brand: a warm, confident public storefront built in the studio's surreal-retro visual identity, and a dense, utilitarian admin interior where speed beats spectacle every time. The admin follows a strict pattern grammar. Every list is filterable, every entity opens in a side panel without losing list context, and every repetitive action earns itself an automation. Being my own daily user forced honest prioritization: friction I felt twice got redesigned, and features I stopped using got cut, no matter how good they looked in a portfolio screenshot.
A shared TypeScript component system spanning storefront and admin, tables, kanban cards, sequence builders, invoice templates, dashboard widgets, with the admin tuned for keyboard-speed operation across all 18 pages.
Key Design Decisions
- 1
Two distinct design registers living on one system: an expressive brand surface for customers, dense operational tooling for the operator, and neither ever compromises the other
- 2
The 8-stage kanban CRM as the admin's home base, so pipeline state becomes the ambient context behind every other module
- 3
Payment-gated instant fulfillment as an inviolable flow: Paystack confirmation triggers delivery with zero operator involvement, every time
- 4
Side-panel entity editing throughout the admin, so the operator never loses list context during rapid triage
- 5
An automation-first bias: invoice generation, sequence sends, and content publishing were all designed to run unattended by default
Landing Page
The public-facing homepage carries the full weight of the brand: dark editorial styling, an orange accent, and a portfolio grid that has to sell the studio's work before a single call happens. Full scroll capture below.
Method
Continuous dogfooding plus customer checkout observation
Participants
1 daily operator · 20+ early customers
Task Success
96% checkout completion
Test Tasks
- 1Complete a product purchase from landing page through Paystack to delivery
- 2Process a new lead from capture through first automated sequence email
- 3Generate, send, and track an invoice for a client engagement
- 4Schedule a week of content from the content calendar
- 5Complete the one-minute morning business review from the dashboard
Key Findings
- 1Checkout completion reached 96% once Paystack was front and center. Abandoned payments had clustered almost entirely in the pre-Paystack prototype
- 2The morning dashboard review initially took over four minutes. Widget prioritization and a today-focused layout brought that under one
- 3Sequence setup was powerful but slow. Building a sequence took too many screens, which prompted a single-page builder redesign
- 4Customers used re-download access far more than expected, which validated the account layer over relying on plain email delivery
- 5Kanban drag interactions on the pipeline needed touch refinements, since the operator does much of the evening triage from a tablet
01 · Dashboard answered the wrong questions first
Before
The first dashboard led with vanity totals, lifetime revenue, total leads, while the actual daily question was always what needs my attention today.
After
I rebuilt it around a today-first layout: stale leads, pending invoices, due content, and live activity on top, with lifetime metrics demoted to a secondary view. Morning review dropped from 4+ minutes to under one.
02 · Sequence builder sprawled across screens
Before
Creating an email sequence meant navigating between separate pages for steps, timing, and content, which made any iteration tedious.
After
I consolidated it into a single-page builder with an inline timeline and per-step editing in place. Sequence creation time dropped by more than half.
03 · Delivery emails landed flat
Before
Post-purchase delivery emails were plain transactional messages, and some customers missed them entirely or doubted they were legitimate.
After
I redesigned delivery emails inside the brand system with clear receipt framing, download buttons, and account-access instructions. Payment-confirmation support messages effectively stopped.
Admin Pages
Products Sold
Uptime
Build Time
Outcome
The platform launched to production with 150+ product purchases in the first month alone. The admin system now manages every client journey, invoice, social post, and email sequence from a single dashboard, running at 99.9% uptime. The follow-up gap is closed by automation, fulfillment is zero-touch, and the platform is built to become a white-label SaaS offering down the line.
What We Learned
Being your own daily user might be the most honest research method there is. Friction you personally feel twice is hard to rationalize away in a backlog.
Operator tools and customer surfaces demand different design registers. The discipline is keeping both on one system without letting either aesthetic bleed into the other.
Automate the moments where trust is at stake first. Instant fulfillment did more for customer confidence than any amount of visual polish on the storefront.
