I realised the other day it’s been about six months since I last wrote one of these.
Not because nothing’s been happening. More because when you’re deep in builds that have a lot of moving parts, the "I’ll write it up when it’s calm" moment never really turns up. And before you know it, you’ve shipped a stack of work that doesn’t fit neatly into a changelog.
So, here’s the honest version of what v4.0 onward has looked like from my side of the screen.
A big theme for this stretch has been building from scratch. Twice. And learning (again) that even when you plan it properly, you can still underestimate just how much time the real-world version takes.
Booking Tools
We shipped Booking Tools, which is basically CreateScene taking a step into "real work happens here".
It lets users set up services they want to offer other users and sell them as a service - whether that’s timed slots, custom projects, or anything that doesn’t quite fit into a neat template. That flexibility was the whole point. If we were going to do it, it had to feel like it could handle the messy reality of how people actually work.
The weird part is: I did plan it out. Properly. It wasn’t a "let’s wing it" build.
And I still underestimated it.
Because the moment you introduce timed services, you inherit the entire universe of calendar edge cases. Time slots look clean on paper. In reality, they’re a constant stream of "what ifs":
- what happens when availability overlaps?
- what counts as a valid slot?
- what’s the cleanest way to handle durations, buffers, and weird schedules without making the UI unbearable?
- how do you keep it flexible without giving people a settings panel that looks like a cockpit?
That’s where the work went. Not in the headline feature, but in the logic underneath it that stops it falling apart as soon as someone uses it differently to how you imagined.
The upside of building from scratch is that you’re not boxed in. There weren’t many "trade-offs" in the traditional sense, because we weren’t patching around legacy constraints. We could build it the way we wanted.
The downside is you’re responsible for everything. There’s nothing to lean on. No shortcuts. No "good enough for now" scaffolding that already exists.
And yes - I did go over my planned deadline on parts of it. Not massively, but enough that you feel it. That’s the reality of scratch builds: the first 80% feels like progress, and the last 20% is where you pay the bill.
Marketplace
The other big one in this stretch is Marketplace.
Same story: another from-scratch build, big enough to deserve a proper chapter instead of being mentioned as a bullet point. It’s one of those features that sounds obvious when you say it out loud - "let people sell things" - but the second you start building it, you realise how many pieces need to click into place for it to feel trustworthy and usable.
This is the kind of feature where the UX matters as much as the backend. It’s not just "can we list items," it’s:
- does it feel coherent inside CreateScene?
- does it feel like something you’d actually use, not a bolted-on page?
- does it sit nicely alongside services and bookings without turning the platform into a mess of unrelated tabs?
And that’s really the throughline here. Booking Tools and Marketplace aren’t just "new features". They’re part of a bigger shift in what CreateScene can be: not just a place to post, but a place to actually do things with the people you meet here.
The quieter work
On top of the big builds, there’s been the usual constant layer of fixes, UI polish, and "why is this behaving like that?" moments. The small stuff that doesn’t make headlines, but makes the platform feel sharper and less fragile over time.
Some of it is satisfying quick wins. Some of it is the kind of thing that looks like a half-hour job until you’re an hour deep and you’re muttering at code that hasn’t seen daylight in a while.
But that work matters. Especially when you’re shipping big new systems - because the platform can’t feel like it’s wobbling while you’re trying to add whole new floors.
Anyway, that’s the gist of the last stretch.
Two big from-scratch builds, a lot of underestimated effort, and the kind of work that’s hard to see from the outside - but you definitely feel if it’s missing.
Frazer
CTO @ CreateScene