Building the technical foundation for a creator-first content platform
Services Provided
Web Development, API Integration, AI Pipeline Development, Fractional CTO
Project Technologies
Ruby on Rails | AWS (ECS, S3, RDS, CloudFront) | OpenAI | PostgreSQL
Industry Served
Social Media, Creator Economy
Team Composition
2 Full-Stack Developers, 1 Project Manager, Fractional CTO
Project Duration
2023-2024
The Challenge
BiteSlice identified a real problem in the creator economy — advertising revenue is absurdly top-heavy, with a small fraction of creators capturing most of the money while smaller creators see comparatively little for their work, and most burn out after a few years of trying to make it their full-time job. Founder Charles Roach wanted to change that dynamic by building a platform where creators could sync their content from multiple social networks and earn 70% of advertising revenue, plus additional income through content licensing to brands, tourism bureaus, and hotels. When Charles came to Twin Sun, he had a working prototype built by another agency, but the existing sync functionality required users to manually request a data dump from YouTube, download it, and upload it to BiteSlice — Charles wanted something that felt like magic, where connecting your accounts once meant everything synced automatically. Beyond the core sync functionality, Charles had a vision for AI-powered content transformation, SEO optimization, and a content syndication platform, and needed a technical team that could execute on that vision and serve as true partners in building the company.
Our Solution
We started by automating the content syncing process, and within a week had a working prototype of an Instagram syncing engine that would automatically pull content on a regular basis from any creator who built a profile with BiteSlice. We replicated that pattern across additional platforms, delivering working integrations for Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (now X), Facebook, YouTube, and WordPress, each requiring navigating platform-specific API approval processes, data use guidelines, and annual security reviews. The profile experience required significant attention, since we were targeting established content creators with substantial followings who had strong opinions about their personal brand — the profile editor needed to be intuitive while offering deep customization, including multiple themes, configurable color schemes, custom fonts, and reorganizable content sections, with a live preview that updated dynamically as creators made changes. We built extensive AI pipelines to transform and enrich content — generating visual descriptions of images and videos for accessibility and SEO, expanding short-form social media posts into long-form blog content using few-shot examples from each creator’s existing writing to preserve their voice, and doing the reverse for WordPress bloggers by extracting interesting aspects of long articles into series of social media posts. All SEO metadata, page titles, and descriptions were AI-generated and optimized for search discovery. We built a content syndication platform that allowed BiteSlice to operate topical social media channels — an ocean travel channel on Facebook, for example, could automatically pull relevant content from any BiteSlice creator with ocean travel imagery, with the system handling scheduling, content selection based on audience interests, and revenue tracking back to individual creators. Throughout the engagement, we worked as collaborative partners providing technical leadership — Dave Lane served as fractional CTO, working closely with Charles day to day and representing BiteSlice in technical conversations with potential investors and acquirers. The team traveled to Hawaii for two weeks to work alongside Charles at the Blue Startups accelerator workspace, meeting other founders, investors, and advisors, and Dave joined Charles for a pitch event at Builders VC in San Francisco in front of 90 potential investors, participating in due diligence conversations for potential M&A activity. Our relationship grew into an equity partnership, which extended BiteSlice’s runway while giving us incentive to stay deeply invested in product development. We collaborated directly with early adopter content creators to learn from their experiences and improve the platform, and built the system for scalability, keeping infrastructure costs in mind throughout by implementing caching strategies, compression optimizations, and CloudFront CDN distribution to ensure the economics would work at scale.
The Results
Creators who tested the platform remarked that it felt like magic — connect your accounts, and within minutes content starts populating. The entire experience was mobile-responsive, including the profile editor, and we maintained a robust test suite that ran with every code change, allowing us to continue building on top of a solid foundation without introducing regressions. We had weekly touchpoints with Charles where he would see what we had built; he described each meeting as Christmas morning, opening presents to see what cool stuff we had delivered, and that trust was earned through consistent delivery. The engagement demonstrated our ability to bring both technical leadership and technology execution to startup founders who need a technical co-founder and a technical team — we were not simply completing tasks as they were handed to us, but collaborative partners invested in the outcome.
