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High-traffic commerce and learning platform

Jefferson Fisher launch platform

I led engineering for the Rare Days platform behind Jefferson Fisher's launch: assessments, checkout and course delivery that generated about $700K USD in total sales in under 48 hours.

Role
Lead engineer
Team
Led a team of 4–5 engineers and designers
Status
Launched October 2026
Stack
Next.js, TypeScript, Stripe, Neon Postgres

Outcome

The launch generated about $700K USD in total sales in under 48 hours.

  • $700KUSD in total sales
  • <48hto reach it, at launch
  • Queuehigh-traffic waiting room built for the spike

What I owned

Led the build of the launch platform for Rare Days' client Jefferson Fisher, from checkout and entitlements through course delivery and the admin tools the team used to run it.

Designed checkout around launch-day demand: database-driven products, authenticated repeat purchase, and queue, 'you're up' and try-again screens for high traffic.

Built group-tier purchasing (promo codes by email and PDF, redemption status on the profile) and bulk entitlement grants from a CSV upload with an audit trail.

Shipped the admin studio for publishing course content, with versioning, update-in-place and revert-to-version, and extended event tracking for the October launch.

System at a glance

The marketing page and assessment bring buyers in, with event tracking extended for the launch.

  1. Next.js application with Better Auth for identity and Neon Postgres (Drizzle) for data.
  2. Stripe powers checkout, including Cash App, with takeover and declined-payment cases handled.
  3. Sanity holds course content and Mux serves video, with intro and outro videos driven from the CMS.
  4. A waiting-room queue protects checkout when traffic spikes.
  5. Sentry and event analytics give visibility into the launch as it happens.

Key decisions

  • Put a queue in front of checkout so the spike degrades gracefully instead of failing payments.
  • Made products database-driven, so offers can change without a redeploy.
  • Kept an audit trail on bulk entitlement grants, because they change what customers can access.

How I approached reliability

  • Playwright end-to-end and Vitest tests, run in CI.
  • Security fixes handled promptly, including admin-only authorization on sensitive course and billing actions.
  • Documented deploy and rollback steps for the team.

Technology focus

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Stripe
  • Neon Postgres
  • Sanity
  • Mux
  • Better Auth
  • Playwright