DEV Community: Mohd Altaf

Why We're Building Adowise Differently: More Than Just a Creator Profile

Mohd Altaf — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:18:28 +0000

There are already plenty of platforms that help creators put a profile online, share a link, receive bookings, or sell something to their audience.

That's useful.

But while building Adowise, we kept asking ourselves:

What happens when a creator wants to build an actual business?

Not just a profile.

Not just a booking link.

Not just a payment page.

An actual business.

That's the problem we're trying to solve with Adowise.

The idea behind Adowise

Adowise is being built as a platform where creators, experts, professionals and businesses can build, monetize and grow from one place.

The difference is the breadth of the system.

Instead of stopping at:

Profile → Booking → Payment

we're building toward:

Audience → Product → Booking → Course → Membership → Marketing → Automation → Revenue → Analytics

The goal is to give creators the infrastructure they need as they grow.

Your Profile Is Only the Beginning

A creator's profile shouldn't just tell people who they are.

It should become their digital business hub.

With Adowise, creators can build a public presence around their expertise and connect that presence directly to the things they sell.

That could be:

1-on-1 mentorship
Digital products
Courses
Webinars
Memberships
Paid queries
Other offers

One profile can become the entry point into an entire creator business.

1-on-1 Mentorship Without the Operational Mess

Many experts monetize their time through consultations, coaching or mentorship.

But managing availability, payments, meeting links and reminders manually becomes painful surprisingly quickly.

Adowise is building the booking infrastructure directly into the platform.

Creators can:

Set availability
Define calendar rules
Accept bookings
Collect payments upfront
Automatically generate meeting links
Send reminders
Manage sessions

The creator focuses on the conversation.

The platform handles the operational layer.

Don't Just Sell Your Time

This is one of the biggest ideas behind Adowise.

If your only product is your time, there is a natural limit to how much you can earn.

That's why we're building digital product selling directly into the platform.

Creators can sell things like:

Ebooks
Templates
Design resources
Code snippets
Guides
Other digital downloads

The important part is that these products can live alongside your mentorship and other offers.

Someone can discover you through your profile, buy a resource today, and potentially book a session tomorrow.

That's a much more powerful relationship than a single transaction.

Turn Knowledge Into Courses

The next step is packaging expertise into something that can reach more people.

Adowise supports courses, cohort-based programs, masterclasses and live webinars.

Creators can build structured learning experiences with:

Video modules
Text modules
Curriculum
Student onboarding
Progress tracking
Ticket sales
Attendee management

Instead of selling the same knowledge one person at a time, creators can package it into an experience for many people.

Build Recurring Revenue With Memberships

One-time transactions are useful.

Recurring relationships can be even more valuable.

Adowise includes membership functionality so creators can create subscription-based experiences.

Creators can create different membership tiers and provide access to:

Exclusive content
Posts
Resources
Community spaces
Member directories
Direct messaging

This gives creators another way to build sustainable revenue around their audience.

Your Audience Should Be Actionable

Having followers is great.

But followers alone aren't a business.

The real question is:

Can you turn attention into action?

That's why we're building Instagram automation into Adowise.

Creators can create automated workflows that respond to things such as comments and story replies.

For example:

Someone comments a keyword.

↓

Adowise triggers a DM.

↓

The person receives the relevant information.

↓

They can be directed to a product or booking.

↓

The interaction can potentially become a transaction.

The important idea isn't automation for the sake of automation.

It's reducing the distance between audience attention and business action.

Funnels Built Into the Platform

A creator might have:

100,000 followers.

10,000 website visitors.

1,000 engaged people.

But how many actually become customers?

That's where funnels matter.

Adowise is building funnel functionality to help creators understand and improve the journey from visitor to customer.

Instead of thinking only about:

How many people visited my page?

you can start thinking about:

How many people moved through the journey?

Visitor → Interest → Offer → Purchase

That's a much more useful way to think about creator growth.

Businesses Are Part of the Same Ecosystem

Adowise isn't only being built for creators.

We're also building a business side.

Why?

Because creators need businesses.

And businesses increasingly need creators.

A brand might want to:

Discover creators
Recruit creators
Launch campaigns
Create affiliate offers
Sell products
Manage contacts
Run events
Track customers
Understand revenue

Instead of treating creators and brands as completely separate systems, we're building both sides into the same ecosystem.

Creator Campaigns

Businesses can create campaigns and define things like:

Deliverables
Compensation
Start dates
Campaign status

Compensation can be structured around:

Flat fees
Free products
Commission

Creators can then discover opportunities and apply.

That creates a direct connection between businesses and creators.

Creator Discovery

Finding the right creator for a campaign shouldn't be completely manual.

Adowise is building a creator marketplace where businesses can discover creators based on factors such as:

Niche
Reach
Expertise
Availability for collaborations

Businesses can then contact creators and manage the relationship.

Affiliate Offers

Not every creator partnership needs to be a traditional sponsorship.

Affiliate partnerships can work extremely well when incentives are aligned.

Businesses can create affiliate offers with:

Percentage commissions
Flat-fee commissions
Product-specific offers

Creators can promote products while businesses can track the resulting performance.

Business CRM

This is another area where we're intentionally going beyond a simple creator marketplace.

Businesses need relationships.

A brand might communicate with dozens or hundreds of:

Creators
Partners
Affiliates
Customers
Collaborators

Adowise includes a CRM-style contacts system so businesses can organize those relationships.

Contacts can have statuses such as:

Lead → Active → Pending → Inactive

Businesses can also add notes and search or filter their contacts.

Customers and Revenue Should Be Connected

Selling something is only the beginning.

Businesses need to know:

Who bought?

How many times did they buy?

How much did they spend?

Are they coming back?

Adowise's customer analytics are designed to provide that context.

Businesses can see customer order history, total spend and order counts, with the ability to export customer information.

One Dashboard for the Business

Another principle we're following is:

Don't make users hunt for their own data.

The business dashboard brings important metrics together.

Revenue.

Bookings.

Page views.

Revenue trends.

Period comparisons.

Businesses can analyze performance across different time ranges.

The objective is to turn raw data into something useful for making decisions.

We're Building Toward AI

And this is where Adowise gets particularly interesting for us as engineers.

We're not interested in adding AI simply because "AI" is trending.

We're interested in what happens when AI becomes part of the actual business workflow.

That's why we're also building Adowise Labs.

Adowise Labs focuses on AI-powered sales workflows, including prospect discovery, outreach, qualification and meeting booking.

The broader vision is:

Creator monetization + business infrastructure + automation + AI

all working together.

So What's Actually Different?

The easiest way to explain it is this.

A basic creator tool might help you answer:

"Where can people book me?"

We're trying to help answer:

"How do I build an entire business around what I know?"

That requires much more than a booking page.

It requires:

Identity

↓

Audience

↓

Products

↓

Services

↓

Payments

↓

Marketing

↓

Automation

↓

Customers

↓

Analytics

↓

Growth

That's the system we're trying to build.

We're Not Finished

Adowise is still being built.

There are features we're improving.

There are ideas we're testing.

There are things that will probably change.

And there will definitely be things we get wrong.

That's part of building software.

We're choosing to build in public because we want to share the process rather than only show the finished product.

We'll be writing about:

Product engineering
SaaS architecture
AI
Automation
Creator monetization
Growth
Technical decisions
Things that break
Things we learn
The Bigger Vision

We don't think creators need another place to simply put a link in their bio.

We think creators and experts need business infrastructure.

Something that can start with one person offering a single service and eventually support:

Products
Courses
Communities
Memberships
Campaigns
Customers
Revenue
Automation
AI

That's what we're trying to build with Adowise.

One platform. Two powerful sides. A creator economy connected directly to the businesses that want to work with it.

We're still early.

But we're building.

And we'll keep sharing what we learn along the way.

From Freelancing to Building My Own SaaS: What Building Adowise Taught Me

Mohd Altaf — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:22:03 +0000

For a long time, I thought becoming a better developer meant learning more technologies.

Learn another framework.
Learn another database.
Learn another cloud service.
Build another project.

But after working on real products, client projects, and eventually building my own SaaS product, I started to realize something:

Writing code is only one part of building software.

The harder part is figuring out what to build, why it should exist, how people will use it, and how to keep improving it after the first version is live.

That realization changed the way I approach software development.

From client work to building products

I started my journey through freelancing and development work.

Working with different projects taught me something that tutorials rarely can: real software has constraints.

Requirements change.

Users behave differently than expected.

A feature that looks simple on paper can become complicated once you connect the frontend, backend, database, authentication, payments, APIs, and deployment.

Eventually, I became more interested in building products rather than only completing individual development tasks.

That eventually led me to start building Adowise.

Why I started Adowise

Adowise started from a simple idea:

There are thousands of professionals, creators, mentors, consultants, and experts who have valuable knowledge but don't necessarily have the infrastructure to turn that knowledge into a business.

They may have an audience.

They may have expertise.

They may have people asking them questions.

But turning all of that into structured products, mentorship, courses, bookings, memberships, and other revenue streams can require stitching together many different tools.

I wanted to build a platform that could bring those pieces together.

Adowise became much more than a coding project.

It became an exercise in product engineering.

What building a real SaaS taught me

The architecture matters, but so does simplicity

When you're building a project for yourself, it's tempting to over-engineer everything.

You start thinking about scalability before you even have users.

You create abstractions for problems that don't exist yet.

You add infrastructure because it sounds impressive.

Building a real product taught me to ask a different question:

What is the simplest architecture that can solve the problem properly today without making tomorrow unnecessarily difficult?

That's a much harder question than choosing a technology.

For my projects, I've worked with technologies including React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, REST APIs, GraphQL, authentication systems, payment integrations, cloud infrastructure, and AI APIs.

The interesting part isn't knowing all of those technologies.

The interesting part is knowing when not to use them.

A feature isn't finished when the code works

One of the biggest differences between a tutorial project and a real product is everything that happens after the feature works.

A feature needs to be:

understandable
reliable
secure
responsive
maintainable
measurable
usable by someone who didn't build it

For example, implementing a payment flow isn't simply calling a payment API.

You have to think about what happens when the payment succeeds.

What happens when it fails?

What happens if the user closes the browser?

What happens if the webhook arrives twice?

What happens if the frontend says one thing but the backend says another?

Those edge cases are where much of the real engineering happens.

Product development changes how you write code

When you're building a portfolio project, you can often optimize for demonstrating a technology.

When you're building a product, you optimize for solving a problem.

That's a completely different mindset.

Instead of asking:

"How can I use this technology?"

I increasingly try to ask:

"What problem am I solving, and what is the most reliable way to solve it?"

The technology becomes a tool rather than the goal.

AI is changing what a small team can build

Another area that has become increasingly important in my work is AI.

I'm particularly interested in the combination of traditional software engineering and AI systems.

AI becomes much more useful when it is connected to actual workflows.

Instead of simply building a chatbot, you can build systems that:

understand information
make decisions within defined boundaries
automate repetitive workflows
interact with APIs
process business data
personalize communication
assist users with complex tasks

This is one reason I'm also working on Adowise Labs, focused on AI-powered sales and automation workflows.

The interesting future isn't necessarily "AI replaces software."

I think it's closer to:

software becomes increasingly capable because AI becomes another layer of the stack.

Building from Himachal Pradesh has changed my perspective

I'm building from Himachal Pradesh, India.

Being outside India's biggest technology hubs has actually made me more interested in the internet as a level playing field.

A developer with a laptop and an internet connection can build software for users anywhere in the world.

You don't necessarily need to be sitting in Bengaluru, Delhi, Mumbai, San Francisco, or London to build something ambitious.

You need the ability to learn, execute, communicate, and keep shipping.

That's one of the things I enjoy most about software.

Geography matters much less when the product itself is digital.

What I'm focusing on now

My current interests are centered around:

Full-stack software development
SaaS products
AI applications
AI agents and automation
Product engineering
Developer tools
Startups
Growth and distribution
Building products in public

I'm especially interested in the intersection between software, AI, automation, and business.

Because ultimately, great software isn't just about elegant code.

It's about creating something that people actually need.

Still learning

I don't consider myself someone who has "figured it all out."

I'm still learning.

I'm still breaking things.

I'm still rewriting code I thought was finished.

I'm still discovering better ways to design systems.

And I'm still figuring out how to turn ideas into products that people genuinely want.

But that's probably the part I enjoy most.

There is always another problem to solve.

Another system to design.

Another product to build.

Another lesson waiting on the other side of shipping.

So that's where I'm at right now:

A software engineer from Himachal Pradesh building products, experimenting with AI and automation, and trying to turn ideas into things people can actually use.

And I'm documenting the journey here.

If you're also building something, I'd love to hear what you're working on.