From business canvas to a student-work marketplace demo in about six weeks

The task

A regional operator of a student employment platform had a business model canvas but no product. Universities, a technology park and a government body needed to see a working flow: task, verified student, mentor, result, dispute with an SLA. Consent, self-employed status, mandatory mentoring and off-platform hiring protection had to be enforced by the server, not by policy.

What we built

• Built the platform from scratch: an async FastAPI backend on PostgreSQL and React/TypeScript workspaces. One codebase, infrastructure via docker-compose, Alembic migrations.
• Legal and platform rules live in the server, not in a policy. No contractor is assigned without data consent, self-employed status and a mentor on first tasks; each refusal has a plain reason.
• Built an evidence layer: each work artifact is stored with a hash and a mentor seal, and a skill cannot appear in a profile without one — enforced by the database. Projects get a weighted 360° score.
• Closed the full loop: university verification, four organization types, service plans with SLAs, disputes with a server-computed deadline, ratings, and Git commits captured as work artifacts.
• Stood up a demo with admin, partner, company and mentor workspaces and demo flows for students, companies and the government partner. A canvas coverage map shows what is built and what is not.

Outcome

~6 weeks

from first commit to a deployed demo with all workspaces; 7 working days in commit history

3 checks

run by the server before a contractor is assigned: data consent, self-employed status, mentor — each with a plain refusal

7 of 7

business canvas blocks covered by MVP modules; 4 gaps named explicitly in the coverage map

47 endpoints

21 tables and 21 screens — MVP scope counted from the code

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