Bunch
Bunch
A modern CRM and email marketing platform for creators and small businesses, featuring visual campaign building, automation flows, and an integrated community forum with social features.
Visit Live SiteThe Challenge
Email marketing tools have become bloated and expensive. Creators and small business owners face overwhelming complexity from enterprise-focused platforms, fragmented workflows across multiple tools, and unpredictable usage-based pricing during growth phases.
The Solution
A unified platform bringing together contact management, email marketing, and community engagement in a single cohesive experience—built around simplicity by default, real-time everything, and multi-tenant architecture from day one.
Responsibilities
Every line of code, every pixel, every interaction.
Product strategy & roadmap
Full-stack architecture design
UI/UX design with custom components
Database schema & multi-tenant isolation
Real-time features via SSE
Email deliverability & tracking
AI integration for content suggestions
Community forum with social features
Tools & Technologies
Frontend
Backend
Infrastructure
AI
The Outcome
Designed and developed a complete CRM platform with visual email builder, automation flows, and a Threads-inspired community forum with social features. Currently in early access with beta users providing feedback.
The Challenge
Email marketing tools have become bloated and expensive. Creators and small business owners face:
- Overwhelming complexity — Most platforms are designed for enterprise teams, burying essential features under layers of menus and options
- Fragmented workflows — Managing contacts in one tool, building emails in another, and engaging community elsewhere creates friction and context-switching
- Opaque pricing — Usage-based billing makes costs unpredictable, especially during growth phases
I wanted to build something different: a unified platform that feels simple without sacrificing power.
The Solution
Bunch brings together contact management, email marketing, and community engagement in a single, cohesive experience. The platform is built around three core principles:
- Simplicity by default — Common tasks should be effortless, with advanced features accessible but not intrusive
- Real-time everything — From live campaign stats to instant community notifications, users always see current data
- Multi-tenant from day one — Agencies and teams can manage multiple brands from a single dashboard
Design Evolution
Building Bunch has been an exercise in iterative refinement. The design evolved through continuous feedback and real-world usage:
Early Iterations
Focused on establishing a clean visual hierarchy. Started with a minimal dashboard that surfaced key metrics without overwhelming new users.
Mid-Development
Brought a shift toward more expressive UI patterns. The email builder evolved from a basic block editor to a fully visual drag-and-drop canvas with real-time preview.
Recent Updates
Introduced the community forum—a Threads-inspired social layer where users can share tips, showcase results, and engage with each other. This required rethinking the information architecture to accommodate social features (likes, follows, reposts) alongside traditional CRM workflows.
Each feature addition forced me to reconsider the whole. The challenge wasn't just building features—it was maintaining coherence as the product grew.
Key Features
Visual Email Builder
A drag-and-drop canvas for creating campaigns without touching code. Supports custom blocks, responsive layouts, and real-time preview across devices.
Automation Flows
Visual workflow builder for triggered sequences. Users can create complex automations—welcome series, re-engagement campaigns, birthday emails—using an intuitive node-based interface.
Contact Management
Unified contact profiles with tagging, segmentation, and activity history. Import contacts via CSV or capture them through embedded forms.
Community Forum
An integrated discussion space with social features: likes, follows, reposts, and real-time updates via Server-Sent Events. Users can filter by topic or see a personalized "Following" feed.
Multi-Workspace Architecture
Agencies and teams can manage multiple brands with isolated data, separate team members, and workspace-specific settings—all from one login.
Deliverability Monitoring
Track open rates, click rates, and bounce rates in real-time. The system flags potential deliverability issues before they impact campaigns.
Technical Architecture
Frontend
- Next.js 16 with App Router for server components and streaming
- TypeScript throughout for type safety
- Tailwind CSS v4 with CSS Modules for component-scoped styles
- Real-time updates via Server-Sent Events (SSE) for live notifications
Backend
- PostgreSQL with lazy schema migrations (tables and columns created on-demand)
- Resend API for email delivery with webhook-based tracking
- Cloudflare R2 for image storage with S3-compatible uploads
- Magic link authentication with secure session management
Security
- CSRF protection on all mutating endpoints
- Role-based access control (super_admin, client roles)
- Workspace-scoped data isolation
- Rate limiting on authentication flows
AI Integration
- Claude API for content suggestions and optimization
- AI-powered subject line generation
- Smart segmentation recommendations
Design Principles
- Progressive disclosure — Show what's needed now, reveal complexity gradually
- Immediate feedback — Every action should produce visible results instantly
- Consistent patterns — Similar actions should work similarly across the platform
- Mobile-aware — Responsive design ensures usability on any device
- Accessible defaults — Keyboard navigation and screen reader support built-in
Results & Reflections
What I Built
- End-to-end CRM with contact management and segmentation
- Full email marketing suite with visual builder and automations
- Community forum with social features and real-time updates
- Multi-tenant architecture supporting isolated workspaces
- Comprehensive API with CSRF protection and rate limiting
Key Learnings
Full-stack ownership accelerates iteration. Controlling both frontend and backend meant I could ship features in hours instead of days. When the community forum needed real-time updates, I could implement SSE end-to-end without coordination overhead.
Type safety pays dividends. TypeScript caught countless bugs before they reached users. The upfront investment in proper typing made refactoring fearless.
Design systems compound. Early investment in consistent components (buttons, modals, form inputs) meant new features came together quickly. The visual language was already established.
Building Bunch reinforced my belief that the best products come from singular vision executed with technical depth. Every line of code, every pixel, every interaction—I made deliberate choices about all of it.
Interested in working together?
Let's discuss your next project and create something great together.
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