Paperclip
A consumer marketplace I helped build twice. First as CTO, building the engineering team and the platform that ran as a branded marketplace for more than forty UK student unions. Then, after an ownership change, returning to bring it back into active development and ship the features that let it see.
- Marketplace
- Item identification
- Listing generation
- Virtual try-on
- Payments
- Google Cloud
AI features, 2024—2026
Listing an item is the moment most marketplace sellers give up. The work in this period attacked that moment directly: photograph the item, and the listing writes itself.
- Item identification and listing generation from photos. Built mostly on OpenAI models. A few phone photos become a draft title, description, category, attributes and a suggested price. The seller only reviews, edits or confirms. That review step is deliberate: the user is the gatekeeper for what goes live, so a wrong guess costs a correction rather than a bad listing.
- Virtual try-on. Lets a buyer see a garment on themselves before asking a question or making an offer. We shipped with a vendor model and also built our own scalable try-on infrastructure. The vendor produced better results overall, so we kept it and treated our own pipeline as the fallback.
- Shipping inside the sale flow, payments work, and a move to Google Cloud.
CTO years, 2017—2023
Built the in-house engineering team to seven or eight people and worked on the marketplace architecture, infrastructure, APIs, payments, deployment, internal administration and the technical side of GDPR compliance. The platform ran as a white-labelled marketplace for more than forty student unions across the UK, each with its own branding on shared infrastructure.
The architecture decision I would still defend: keep the infrastructure as simple as possible for as long as possible. A small team shipping a consumer product cannot afford to operate complexity it does not yet need, and every piece we deferred was one we understood better by the time we actually had to build it.
Status
Active development ended in early 2026. I continue to help with maintenance.