The company
Spotful was an interactive video company, led by PEI entrepreneur Andrew Murray. His vision was a platform that allowed people to add context and interactive elements right on top of their existing video content. While this is fairly common nowadays, we had shoppable videos well before they were commonplace!
With a few customer under our belt, Andrew had a business associate in Japan, who was able to get Spotful a deal with Rakuten, and so with a weekend hackathon, we started supporting ad-tech and were able to easily build interactive video advertising experience that Rakuten was running on its commerce websites.
Eventually, Spotful was dissolved.
The role
Spotful was my first full-time position in tech. I started in the role of design integrator, where I built out and maintained a style library using SCSS for the management and architecture.
Early on, I attended one of Brad Frost’s workshops on Atomic Design, was able to easily apply the atomic methods to our SCSS architecture in a manageable and well-documented structure.
I assisted with design and experimentation, and helped develop the vision from paper sketches to a working and stylish prototype, which we raised money on, and got into Founder Fuel Montreal with.
Over the next 2 years I took on more responsibility as a project manager, and started taking some product management courses, and attending lectures and product events. I managed the day to day tasks of the small team, and worked with the lead developer, CTO, and CEO on research, and developing new POCs and feature directions.
By 2018, I was building and maintaining most of the front-end code, building components in Angular, managing our SCSS library, and running the dev project management.
When the company was dissolved in 2019, most of the company was let go, save for myself and a single developer. At that time, the company had been taken over by our main investor, and I was providing customer service for our Japan branch, and our lead developer was keeping the lights on. Months later we were laid off and the rest of the company was shut down.
The tech
When I first started, the working prototype for Spotful that had enabled us to raise, was built on a version of ModX, and hosted on the developer’s personal server.
Our first working and sellable prototype was built on the original Angular, with styles managed with SCSS and a Gulp script to compile and minimize everything. The backend was build with Laravel.
Spotful was eventually migrated to Angular 2, where it stayed until it was retired.
The designs
