Coast Competitions

The brief

Coast runs skill-based prize competitions: a player answers a question, buys an entry, and an automated draw picks a winner. The founder had a working idea and a deadline. What they didn't have was a platform that could launch a new competition from a CMS, take money safely, and prove — to a player, after the fact — that the draw was fair.

The hard part

The build wasn't the hard part. The hard part was the rules around it. A competition platform in the UK has to be provably fair and aware of where the FCA line sits, and it has to hold up when a draw goes live and everyone arrives at once. We designed the draw so the outcome is seeded, recorded, and replayable — and we put the result on a public Draw Results page, with a Winners page beside it, so a player can check the draw wasn't decided after the fact.

What we built

A Next.js 15 front end, Postgres on Neon, and a Stripe integration that handles card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay while keeping ticketing and draw records tied together. Cameron designed the admin so a non-technical operator could schedule and launch a competition without us in the loop; Joel built the draw engine and the ticketing underneath it. One designer, one engineer, same build cycle, same level of finish.

What we cut

The hardest call wasn't what to build — it was which features to cut to ship inside the launch window. We kept the draw, the ticketing, and the CMS, and we said no to everything that didn't make the first launch safer or faster. That's the part a two-person studio is actually good at: deciding what not to do, and defending it.