Chance had built strong relationships with creators, but the workflow powering creator sales was held together by spreadsheets, manual processes, and a lot of coordination from a very small team. For creators, selling Chance packs during livestreams meant stitching together their own workflow. A creator would promote packs on stream, collect payments through external tools, keep track of purchases in spreadsheets, manually determine who bought what, and then coordinate fulfillment after the stream ended. As the number of orders increased, so did the operational burden. The process worked, but it wasn't scalable.

For buyers, the experience wasn't much better. Users were often redirected to a basic e-commerce storefront to purchase packs, disconnected from the livestream experience that motivated them to buy in the first place. After completing a purchase, buyers had little visibility into what happened next. Questions like: "Did my order go through?" Where am I in line? Has my pack been opened yet? What cards did I pull? often required manual communication and troubleshooting. The experience felt fragmented despite being centered around a highly social activity.

Internally, we faced another challenge. Creators were one of our primary growth channels, but there was very little visibility into creator performance. Many creators didn't know where to find their referral links, how many users they were bringing to the platform, or how their audiences were converting.

As a result, the team spent a significant amount of time manually answering questions, tracking referrals, and helping creators understand their impact. What should have been a scalable growth engine required constant hands-on support. The underlying problem wasn't a missing page or missing feature. The problem was that the creator ecosystem had never been designed as a system. Buyers, creators, and the internal team were all solving the same problems manually.