Case study · Live product · SaaS
PaperPlay
The operating system for local live music — from finding the right artist to paying the full team, with a clean record of what happened.
Visit paperplay.live
01 · Context
Where this came from.
I spent 2018–2023 running a live-music venue. The relationships work; the operating infrastructure around them does not — booking happens in fragmented messages, payment splits in spreadsheets, tax records in January panic. PaperPlay is the system I wished existed when I was the one writing the checks.
02 · What I owned
Mine, personally.
- Product thesis, operating model, and technical direction
- The build itself — backend, frontend, payments, and release pipeline, shipped hands-on with AI-assisted development
- Go-to-market systems: venue research, outreach, and onboarding workflows
- The operating discipline: staging environments, release gates, audits, and safety controls
03 · What's live (verifiable)
What a skeptic should know.
A working platform spanning the full engagement lifecycle: venue–artist discovery and booking, team collaboration, split payments with payouts, and tax-record workflows — running in production at paperplay.live. Not a prototype, not a deck.
04
How it's built — the discipline signals
- Stripe-based split payments and payouts live in production
- Tax-record (1099) workflows built into event close-out
- CI/CD with staging → production separation and release gates
- Automated test suites and fixtures gating every deploy
- Feature-flagged rollouts — new surfaces ship dark, then gate on
The point isn't that AI wrote code. It's that an operator can now personally ship the automation he used to spec.
05 · What this transfers to
Why it matters in-house.
- Payments operations: money movement with auditable state, not spreadsheets
- Release discipline: staging, gates, and rollback thinking applied to any ops change
- Systems design: each workflow has an owner, a state, and an evidence trail
- AI leverage: knowing first-hand what one operator plus AI tooling can actually ship
What to verify
Visit paperplay.live — the signup and marketplace are public. Source
Ask me to walk the architecture, the payment flows, or the release pipeline on a call — no slides.
Ask to see the staging environment and the release gates, live.
Hiring for senior operations? Let's find out fast.
Open to full-time senior operations roles · Huntsville, AL · local or remote · Updated August 2026
Send the job description — the reply comes from me, not a form. · phillip@paperplay.live