Overview

Maildroppa is an email marketing platform for teams that have outgrown spreadsheets and basic tools. It runs on two public surfaces: maildroppa.com, the marketing and content site that drives signups, and app.maildroppa.com, the SPA where customers spend their day — building campaigns, managing subscriber lists, setting up automations, handling billing, and configuring their accounts.

The platform had reached 14,000 active subscribers by the time I contributed. That scale means both surfaces are real products, not demos. The marketing site competes for trust against established players. The app handles money, user data, and email deliverability — none of which tolerates fragile UI.

The Challenge

The two surfaces had different problems. On the marketing side, the team needed to move fast on copy and content without waiting on a developer for every change. The site also had to earn the trust of a buyer comparing Maildroppa against better-known tools — which means SEO, performance, and the feel of the page matter before a single feature is read.

On the app side, the challenge was reliability in the areas that directly touch revenue. Stripe's checkout flow, subscription management, and attribution tracking all need to behave correctly on the first attempt. Email products live and die on trust. A billing glitch or a broken onboarding step does not just cause a support ticket — it causes a cancellation.

My Role

I worked as a freelance frontend contributor across both surfaces simultaneously, which meant context-switching between two codebases with different frameworks, different audiences, and different risk profiles. On the marketing site, I owned the implementation and CMS integration. On the app, I worked as a contributor inside an existing codebase, building and refining features alongside the core team.

That dual scope — public marketing and internal product, in the same engagement — required understanding where the two surfaces connect in the user's mind and making sure neither one undermined the other.

What I Built

Marketing Site — Conversion and Content

I built and refined the responsive landing pages in Next.js and Tailwind CSS, structuring each page around proof, offer, and a clear next action rather than a wall of features. The goal was to move a skeptical buyer from the landing page to a trial without friction.

To remove the bottleneck between the marketing team and the live site, I integrated Directus as a headless CMS. Editors could update copy, restructure sections, and publish changes without touching the codebase or waiting for a deploy. That shift made the marketing team self-sufficient on day-to-day content.

SEO work covered metadata, semantic HTML structure, and practical performance — fast-loading pages with correct share previews and title hierarchies that match what search engines actually read.

Customer Application — Billing, Attribution, and Product Features

Inside the React SPA, I worked across the feature areas that matter most to retention: billing flows built on Stripe Elements, subscription management, onboarding, and the automation tools customers use to build their email programs.

Attribution tracking required particular care. The implementation reads a referral parameter from the URL, persists it correctly across sessions, and posts once to the tracking endpoint per the rules defined in code. Getting that wrong means marketing data is corrupted. I made sure it was explicit and testable.

I also contributed to the engineering quality layer — unit tests alongside feature code, end-to-end smoke coverage for the critical auth paths, and linting configuration that kept the codebase consistent as the team grew. On a product at this scale, that infrastructure is not optional.

Results

The Directus integration eliminated developer dependency for routine content updates. The marketing team could publish and iterate on copy, offers, and page structure on their own timeline — not on a deployment schedule.

The Stripe billing implementation and attribution layer shipped without regressions in the paths that touch revenue directly. For a platform managing subscriptions at 14,000-subscriber scale, that reliability is the result.

The marketing site's SEO and performance work positioned pages correctly for search and share — correct metadata, fast load, and semantic structure that reflects the actual content hierarchy rather than styling choices.

Closing

Working across a marketing site and a production application in the same engagement meant every decision had two contexts: what converts a new visitor, and what keeps a paying customer. Maildroppa required both, at the same time.