MVP shipped in 8 weeks - payback achieved within the first 3 months of launch through monetized content formats built into the product from day one.
Think ABM — a B2B content platform monetized through promoted paid publications. The portal had to be visually appealing for users and easy to operate for the editors and copywriters who run it day-to-day. The launch deadline was tight — two months to a working commercial product — and the architecture had to be designed to scale into AI-powered ranking and a richer editorial taxonomy in the next versions.
Shiksha is the founder and CEO of Think ABM, a London-based B2B marketing company. She approaches the product with a strong focus on data, buyer behavior, and execution quality. For Shiksha, it was non-negotiable that the platform's logic and content model are built exactly as designed. She came to the project looking for a technical partner with deep engineering depth, fast delivery cadence, and clear ownership of outcomes — not just feature throughput.
Aggressive launch deadline
Built from scratch, but expected to behave like a commercial product on day one — not a prototype.
Editorial autonomy
Editors and copywriters had to publish, edit, and reorganize materials without ever filing a developer ticket.
Multi-axis content structure
Verticals, categories, and tags had to scale on a complex taxonomy without becoming unmanageable.
AI-ready search
The MVP needed a search layer architected to grow into AI-powered ranking and discovery in the next product version.
Mobile-first audience
~88% of expected platform traffic was projected to come from smartphones, so mobile UX and mobile performance were primary, not secondary, constraints.
We built a headless platform from scratch, with a strong frontend tuned for fast content consumption on mobile and a CMS core that gives the editorial team end-to-end control without developer involvement in daily operations. The foundation: Next.js on the frontend, Directus as the headless CMS — a scalable, editor-friendly setup designed to absorb new content types and verticals without rebuilds.
Frontend
We implemented the key pages and UI components in Next.js + React so users could move quickly between verticals, categories, and individual materials. Navigation was designed mobile-first, with a structure built to stay coherent as the content library grows.
Architecture
Directus was configured as the editorial core with a clear content model. We designed a workflow with the statuses Draft → In Review → Scheduled → Published, plus validation through Directus Flows so a publication cannot be published without required fields. Content changes sync with the frontend through webhooks and on-demand revalidation in Next.js, so updates appear on the site immediately after a save — without a full site rebuild.
Content templates
We standardized publication formats through templates and required fields, so pages assemble consistently regardless of which author is writing. This removed the manual page-stitching, cut formatting errors, and turned content production into a repeatable process.
Content validation
We added validation rules, publishing statuses, and baseline restrictions in the CMS to prevent any material with critical gaps from being published. These technical safeguards reduce urgent post-publication fixes and production incidents.
Content search
We implemented platform-level search with correct indexing of key fields and predictable result ranking. This gave users fast access to materials inside a growing library and removed the dependency on navigation as the only path to discovery.
Performance
Performance was set as a core MVP requirement: optimized page rendering, proper media loading (responsive images, lazy-loading, modern formats), and API + CDN-level caching so pages don't degrade as content volume grows. This was designed to eliminate the risk of slow mobile performance and UX deterioration at scale.
Operations
We set up dev and production environments, CI/CD for controlled releases, and monitoring + logging for fast incident triage. We also designed backups and baseline security practices so the product was supportable from day one.
We started by validating assumptions about audience needs, the core content-consumption scenarios, and the monetization logic behind paid placements. We defined the must-have v1 capabilities: search, vertical-based navigation, material detail pages, the base content structure, and editorial autonomy without developer involvement. We defined the initial material types and the minimum field set that makes a publication "ready." Output: the MVP scope and an explicit deferred-list for later iterations, including the runway for AI-powered search in v2.
+3 Resource
The 8-week launch delivered a working product the editorial team runs independently, with paid content formats integrated into the MVP rather than retrofitted afterwards.
share of sessions reading 2 or more materials in the first 4 weeks after launch — an increase in engagement depth driven by vertical-based navigation and consistent page templates
time spent to publish a material vs. the prior manual process — increase in editorial throughput across the first content backlog
urgent post-publication fixes — validation rules and required-field enforcement at the CMS level eliminated the most common pre-launch errors
time spent to push a paid placement or partner material into production — templates and pre-structured content attributes removed the per-placement layout effort
time spent to spin up a new vertical with its starter pages — no manual page-stitching or site-logic rebuilds
of internal editorial requests to engineering and support around typical mistakes, permissions, and publication structure — roles and CMS rules absorbed what previously required engineering involvement
monetization formats live at launch, not deferred to v2
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