Playboy.com

01. The Challenge

Build a competitor to OnlyFans for the adult creator marketplace that has class. The marketplace requirements were to provide a 1-to-1 match for features against OnlyFans. We accomplished that and added more features with the focus being creator enablement. Eight months after launch, we received an offer from Playboy to purchase Dream with a few caveats:

1. Redesign the entire UI - at the time of interest, there was no mobile site nor did the site reflect the Playboy brand.
2. Scale up the system - in order to support viral growth, certain chokeholds needed to be addressed with millions of users being the target.
3. Move the system from on premise to cloud infra - migrate the system to AWS to help support resource demands.
4. Time limit - the turn around time to achieve all of this was 8 weeks.

02. The Solution

We heavily scaled up the team and pulled all available engineers into a continuous war room. Regarding scale, we audited every system to understand scale risk and consequently prioritized various weak points to meet our predefined scale needs.

The frontend was mobile web view only as a result of the traffic sources originating from mobile focused sites / apps. We completely changed the frontend UI to support mobile AND desktop while re-branding the site in parallel.

Coordinating across multiple teams in various time zones with 24/7 development around the clock, we created a development super-team.

03. The Result

We launched the new version of Dream, Centerfold.com (now called Playboy.com). We saw thousands of users week 1 sign up and use the product with zero downtime. Both frontend and backend goals were accomplished.

The team had grown from 12 engineers to 50+ that were operating globally with a middle management layer of 4 PMs leading up to a 3 man operations team.