The Problem
Public coupon platforms promise visibility, but they often create saturation and give brands less control. Cupis was built as a closed alternative: private offers for verified employees at partner companies in Spain.
The founders had a clear vision, but no internal engineering team. They needed someone to help turn what they had in mind into a real product, ready for production and able to grow with the business.
The platform needed to include:
- Private signup for verified employees
- Curated coupon catalogue
- Admin dashboard for the founders and the Cupis team
- Import and management of shared or unique coupon codes
- Visibility rules for companies, industries, and brands
- Per-coupon analytics
- Infrastructure that could handle weekly campaign spikes without driving up costs
The Solution
I helped the founders turn the idea into a production-ready web app split into two parts: an admin dashboard for the founders and Cupis team, and a user area for verified employees.
User Area
Private signup by email domain. Instead of asking users to select their company from a dropdown, signup validates the email domain against a whitelist. If the domain matches, the account is linked automatically; if it does not, the user sees a generic error that never reveals which companies are Cupis clients.
Coupon catalogue and code usage. Employees access a curated catalogue, open the offers available to their company, and copy the code when they're ready to redeem the offer.
Admin Area
Operations dashboard for the founders and Cupis team. The admin lets the team manage companies, employee access, coupons, coupon codes, visibility rules, and analytics from a single dashboard.
Company access requests. Companies can be created manually by an admin or request access through a self-service form with approval.
Coupon creation and management. Each coupon can use either one shared code or unique codes imported by CSV, including more than 50,000 codes for a single offer. I optimized how codes are assigned to coupons so the admin stays fast during imports and employees can retrieve and copy the available code without slowdowns.
The main features include:
- Brand information
- Rich-text terms
- Public preview links for partner approval
- Visibility rules by company or industry
- Per-coupon analytics
- Direct clicks to the brand's site
Tools and platforms
- Next.js to keep the user portal and admin area in a single codebase
- Supabase for auth, database, and backend in one platform
- Vercel for hosting, deployments, and previews
- Resend for transactional emails
- Debugging and error-monitoring tools to track stability and issues during development
The Outcome
Cupis now has a production-ready platform with all the functionality the founders wanted and more than they had imagined at the start. The team can independently manage companies, access, coupons, codes, visibility, and analytics from the admin portal, while employees get a simple experience for accessing the offers available through their company.
"We found Nicola and within 1-2 calls we knew he was the CTO our company needed. He doesn't just deliver perfectly, he actively challenges our briefings and brings on ideas and recommendations which in the end made the platform better than initially planned.
The workflow was exceptional: visuals for each project step, mockups that only needed minor refinements, and a single feedback round was all we needed. We received a product that exceeds our initial expectation and is ready to be deployed on a moment's notice.
In the era of vibe coding and AI, not enough is said about having somebody on your side who truly understands your needs and those of your future customers. We are beyond excited to keep growing Cupis with Nicola as our CTO."
