A social entertainment platform for the UAE — combining live streaming, creator monetisation, and community into a single home-grown product.
Blingram is a social entertainment and creator economy platform built for the UAE market. It combines TikTok-style content discovery, Instagram-level social depth, and Snapchat's ephemeral stories — with a built-in creator earning system.
Creators host live sessions with bookable seats and coin-based pricing. Followers send virtual gifts. Earnings convert to real money via an integrated wallet connected directly to the creator's bank account. Built for a specific gap in the market: TikTok faces recurring bans in UAE. Blingram is the home-grown alternative built to last.
This project came in through LinkedIn — first meeting was a room full of C-level stakeholders with a concept, no existing product, no project manager, and a hard 4-month deadline. Everything that followed was built from scratch.
Deep dive into the UAE social media landscape, TikTok ban risks, and creator economy mechanics. Key insight: the audience spans highly tech-literate users AND people who've never used a social app. Both had to succeed with the same product.
Onboarding, feed, discovery, stories, live streaming, live session booking with ticketed seats and countdown timers, gifting, coins and wallet, messaging (group, direct, photo/video/voice), creator dashboard, admin dashboard.
Continuous batch handoff of components and specs directly to the development team while design was still in progress — no waiting, no bottlenecks.
QA, design review against live builds, final refinements, and simultaneous launch across App Store and Google Play within the 4-month window.
Navigation kept flat and instinctive. Key actions always visible. Iconography paired with labels throughout — so both a power user and a first-time smartphone user could succeed without friction.
Designed with banking-grade clarity — total coins, spent, gifted, and earned all at a glance. Full transaction history. Familiar mental models borrowed from mobile banking, not gaming.
Ticketing-style flow — seat selection, coin pricing, limited availability, countdown timers. Creates genuine urgency without adding friction to the core experience.
A full product — iOS, Android, web admin dashboard, and website — shipped solo in four months, with zero dedicated project management support.
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