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Case study
A location-based directory and subscription platform connecting students with local music teachers, with a pay-per-referral lead engine for educators.
Melody Map is a music-educator directory and subscription platform I co-founded with a partner I met through the West Virginia cohort of Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses. He brings the music-education domain; I am the technical co-founder and built the platform.
Students, parents, and adult learners search for qualified local teachers by location. Educators get a verified profile, subscription-based promotion, and a pay-per-referral pipeline that delivers interested students.
Finding a good local music teacher is a fragmented, word-of-mouth process with no directory anyone trusts. On the other side, independent educators and studios have no simple way to be found.
A directory has to work for both sides at once, and the educator side is the harder one: it only survives if being listed is worth paying for. That makes billing and lead delivery part of the product rather than an afterthought bolted on later.
I built the stack on Firebase: Python Cloud Functions behind a single API gateway, a Firestore data model with a deliberate public/private split, and Firebase Auth with custom claims mirroring the subscription tier for access control. Public profiles and owner-only billing data never share a document.
Location search runs on the Google Places API with a Firestore caching layer in front of it to keep cost bounded. Billing uses Stripe for both recurring subscriptions and a pre-authorized pay-per-referral charge, alongside a transactional email pipeline built in-house rather than rented.
The parts worth pointing at
Where the engineering decisions actually mattered.
The platform is live. Search it the way a parent looking for a teacher would.