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Case Study · Product Management & Web App Build · Events Platform
WhatsNext is a hyperlocal events discovery platform for North San Diego County. Over eight months we ran it as technical product manager and builder: user accounts, business storefronts, a database-driven city system, an events ingestion pipeline, and the admin tooling that keeps it all honest.
The platform
WhatsNext helps people in North San Diego County find local events: Oceanside, Carlsbad, Vista, San Marcos, Escondido, Fallbrook, and Bonsall. Community members submit events, businesses run their own storefronts, and city agents manage their patch from a scoped admin panel.
The platform is owned by Dave Mears (NextHQ), with GoHighLevel as the back-office CRM. Nexum-sol's Abdulmuiz ran the product and the build: writing the PRDs, making the architecture calls, and shipping the features.
This is what our Custom Web Application service looks like in practice.
The challenge
When the engagement began, WhatsNext was a working events site with real limits baked in. Growing it meant treating it as a product, and every limit below became a workstream with its own PRD.
Four city names lived in the code itself. Adding a fifth meant a developer, a code change, and a deploy. The plan called for seven cities and room for more.
No accounts, no saved events, no way to keep what you found. Every visit started from zero.
Local businesses are the platform's natural paying customers, and there was nowhere for them to exist: no storefronts, no claim process, no self-service event management.
Every event had to be typed in by hand. A discovery platform with thin listings answers its own core question badly.
A platform is what remains when the builder walks away. Every workstream moved something from code and manual effort into data and self-service: cities became database rows, admin became role-scoped, content grew its own pipeline.
The working method
Specify first. Preview before build.
Trust the server, never the browser.
Every feature started as a written PRD before a line was built. UI changes were rendered as previews before committing. And every rule that matters (who owns a business, who can edit a city, what counts as saved) is enforced in the database with row-level security, out of reach of a curious browser console.
The feature roadmap ran as lettered workstreams (accounts, storefronts, personalisation, external events), each with its own PRD, and changes landed as amendments rather than silent rewrites. Sessions months apart picked up cleanly because the paper trail is real.
A line-by-line security pass hardened the platform: row-level security on business data, a locked-down audit log, storage upload limits, and claim operations moved into database functions with guards enforced in SQL.
The build
Eight months of shipped work, in the order it compounds.
A cities table became the single source of truth: name, tagline, coordinates, region, active flag, display order. Seven cities seeded, every hardcoded array removed, and a super-admin screen for adding the eighth.
Saved events with smart folders: tap the heart, the event auto-tags itself into one of eight categories, and the visitor keeps five saves free before an account is asked for. On signup, their saves migrate from the browser into the database and follow them across devices.
Businesses get public storefront pages with their own event management. City agents can create a storefront on a business's behalf during a field visit; the owner later claims it through an invite flow whose ownership rules are enforced in the database, atomically.
An Eventbrite ingestion pipeline scrapes, cleans, and imports events through a four-layer QA playbook. Roughly 853 imported events were live at the time of writing, alongside community submissions.
05 / OPERATIONSA role ladder (user, moderator, admin, super admin) with city-scoped assignments: an Oceanside agent manages Oceanside. Promotions run on a carousel with automatic expiry, and the moderation queue keeps community submissions accountable.
A platform is what remains when the builder walks away. Cities are rows, rules live in the database, and the admin panel does not need us in it.Nexum-sol, design rationale
Where it stands
The platform is live at whatsnext.buzz. The figures below come from the project's own build records, July 2026.
Every feature above survives handover. The PRDs, decision logs, and session records exist as documents, so any developer can pick the platform up cold. That documentation discipline is part of the engagement, and it is the difference between owning a product and renting a developer.
Services demonstrated in this project
WhatsNext went from hardcoded lists to a self-service platform because someone owned both the product decisions and the code. We do that. Tell us what you are trying to build and we will tell you, honestly, what it takes.