Gameplan

Gameplan is a marketing services agency. The business sells brand work, design, and ongoing execution to clients who don't have a marketing team of their own. To manage all of it, Darren had stitched together Assembly — a generic project-management SaaS — to handle client requests, deliverables, and team workflows.

It worked. Until it didn't. Assembly cost real money every month, it was built for everyone (which means it was built for no one), and every product decision Darren wanted to make for his agency was bottlenecked by whatever Assembly's roadmap felt like shipping that quarter. Worse, the v1 of the actual Gameplan app was running on Bubble — a no-code platform with limits Darren had hit years earlier.

The mandate was clear: replace Assembly. Replace Bubble. Build a portal Gameplan actually owns — fast enough that the business doesn't skip a beat, and architected so it can absorb whatever AI does to agency software over the next three years.

Most agency-portal rebuilds stop at "we have a Kanban board now." Gameplan's didn't. The architecture was designed in three layers from day one:

v1. A working portal — services catalog, Kanban, file library, client and admin views, Stripe checkout, email notifications. The "we own this now" baseline.

v2. Ari — an embedded AI layer that intakes new client work conversationally, drafts task briefs, scopes services, books meetings, and orchestrates external tools like Canva for design output. The portal stops being a place to fill out forms and starts being a place where work gets assigned through conversation.

v3. A faceless MCP-native brand-context layer. The end state where a client never opens the portal at all — they ask Claude (or any AI agent) for design help, the agent calls Gameplan for brand context, and the work happens elsewhere. Gameplan becomes the intelligence hub, not the UI.

The discipline is shipping v2 while writing v3-compatible code. Every Ari capability is built as a skill that can later be exposed via MCP. The portal is the wedge. The brand-context platform is the moat.

The team executed three parallel workstreams without breaking client service.

The migration. Bubble v1 → Next.js v2 on a fresh stack. Supabase replaced the legacy Flusk security layer. Stripe replaced manual invoicing. Resend handled transactional email and team invites. Vercel preview branches gave Darren a way to review every PR before it merged. Assembly's role got absorbed into a custom Kanban + file library inside the portal.

The AI layer. Ari started as a sidebar chat scoped to individual service pages and grew into a full-screen workspace. The "loop in humans" feature turned every Ari conversation into a 3-way thread where a Gameplan strategist could jump in mid-flow. Ari got skills for brief intake, service scoping, task writing, and Google Calendar booking. Every skill is structured to graduate to an MCP tool when v3 arrives.

The Apps Framework. Discrete capabilities — Website Assessment, Competitor Analysis, Logo Creator — built as installable "apps" inside the portal, each with its own scope, billing hook, and Ari skills underneath. The architecture: apps are the contract, skills are the implementation.