Artmeet

The Problem

Creatives in Southeast Asia — graphic designers, illustrators, UI/UX designers — struggled to find relevant job opportunities. On the other side, recruiters had no efficient way to discover and hire design talent at scale. Existing platforms were either too generic or lacked the specialized features creative professionals needed.

The Solution

Together with my co-founders, we built Artmeet — a multi-sided creative talent marketplace connecting designers with recruiters across Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.

What I Built

As CTO, I owned the entire technical stack and led all engineering decisions:

• Job Marketplace — A full-featured job board with search, filtering, and matching algorithms tailored to creative roles
• Applicant Tracking System (ATS) — Custom-built candidate pipeline management for recruiters
• Virtual Interview System — Integrated video interview capabilities
• Design Competitions — A competition engine with judging systems, scoring rubrics, and community discussion boards
• Freelance Project Matching — A bidding system connecting clients with freelance creatives
• Community Features — Portfolio showcases, voting engines, and networking tools

Technical Decisions

The platform was built on CodeIgniter with MySQL, deployed on AWS. Key architectural decisions included:

• Multi-tenant architecture supporting designers, recruiters, judges, and administrators
• Redis caching layer for high-traffic pages
• Optimized search with faceted filtering across skills, location, and experience level
• Real-time notification system for job matches and competition updates

The Impact

• Scaled to 20,000+ designers and 6,000+ recruiters
• Expanded across 3 countries (Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines)
• Raised an angel funding round
• Went through accelerators including Antler, 1337 Ventures ASDA, Sunway iLabs LaunchX, and MYStartup Pre-Accelerator

Lessons Learned

Building Artmeet taught me that the best products come from relentless iteration based on user feedback. What started as a simple job portal evolved into a full-fledged creative ecosystem — not because we planned it that way, but because our users showed us what they needed.