MARCAVO

I’ve been in this space, the freelancer juggling client emails, chasing invoices, trying to look professional with a patchwork of tools that don’t talk to each other. The market for freelancers, photographers, and small studios is thriving, but the tools haven’t kept up.

So I built Marcavo: in one month, from scratch. Every screen, every API call, every database table. One login, one dashboard, one place where the client–admin relationship just works: an admin side to run the business, and a branded client portal that makes clients feel taken care of. No bloat, no enterprise pricing, and I designed and built the product and the marketing site end to end.

I looked at every client management tool out there: HoneyBook, Dubsado, Bonsai, you name it. They were either built for enterprise teams with budgets to match, or they were so stripped down they couldn’t handle a real workflow. The freelancers, the photographers, the small agencies actually doing the work, they were stuck duct-taping five different tools together and calling it a system.

The client-admin relationship should be simple. A client should be able to log in, see their project, pay their invoice, and message their person, all in one place. And the admin should be able to manage everything without switching tabs. That’s not a big ask. But nobody was building it for the little people, so I did.

Marcavo was a team of one. I designed it, built every layer of it, database, API, auth, real-time messaging, frontend, deployment, and made the product calls myself. When there’s no handoff, every design decision has to survive contact with the database and the API, which forces a kind of honesty most design work never sees.

Two decisions shaped the whole product:

Every feature was designed around two roles: the Admin (the freelancer or agency running their business) and the Client (their customer using the portal). Here’s what’s live in beta: