Build a Launchpad platform in just 3 days and $400 with step-by-step guidance

Original Title: I Built a Launchpad in 3 Days for $400 (and so can you)
Original Author: ultra

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

Last weekend, I worked overtime to create the project Blind, just to prove: building a meaningful product doesn't require millions of dollars in funding, months of work, or even a team.

Blind is a token launch platform developed on the Base chain, running on Flaunch’s infrastructure. It experiments with a brand-new mechanism: allowing token creators to autonomously choose which personal information to disclose when issuing tokens.

This way, creators can leverage their reputation or credentials as endorsements, without fully revealing their real identities or bearing the usual troubles of being a “token spokesperson.” In addition, creators can set entry thresholds, only allowing users who meet minimum criteria to participate.

Purpose of This Article

This article aims to share my general framework from “idea” to “product.”

As I often say, the current 6-12 months are the “golden period for idea realization.” With the help of AI tools, turning ideas into reality is exceptionally easy, but few people realize this. For those willing to invest time, this is undoubtedly a huge arbitrage opportunity.

I hope this article inspires more people to try vibecoding, turning their ideas into reality, and bringing Web3 back to the era dominated by independent developers and small teams, where innovation is born every day.

This article assumes readers have a certain technical foundation, are familiar with development tools, code repository management, and common component knowledge.

Stage 0: Source of Inspiration

The idea of social capital gating had been brewing in my mind for months. In the process of frequently using tools like Kaito, Ethos, fantasy.top, time.fun, and researching SocialFi metrics, one question kept coming up in discussions: why hasn’t anyone built a dashboard that integrates users’ profiles across all these platforms, evaluating user credentials with scores and data?

In the past six months or so, the “creator metrics” field has risen rapidly, and now people can evaluate the value of a person or account through various data dimensions.

So, can these metrics be used to set “participation thresholds” (such as token issuance entry requirements)? And can creators decide for themselves which metrics to disclose to the public while hiding their real identities?

What really pushed me to start developing was seeing Pump.fun raise 500 millions USD, and recently heaven also raised 20 millions USD. In my view, the development difficulty of these two products isn’t high, so why are their valuations so exaggerated? And there are many other similar successful launch platforms, all of which have raised huge amounts of funding.

To be fair, in this field, to stay rational, we’ve actually stopped obsessing over “token valuation logic”; many times, the valuation itself is completely unreasonable.

But in any case, this triggered my personal challenge: can I, over a weekend, at extremely low cost and without external help, build a product of comparable quality?

My goal is not to build a commercial product, issue tokens, or even make money, but to prove “it can be done,” and hopefully inspire more people to follow this path.

Stage 1: Problem Breakdown

Once you have the idea, the first step is to break it down into core components and make decisions for each. For a “launch platform with social access control,” I identified the following sub-questions:

Choice of On-chain Tech Stack

The primary decision is “which chain to deploy on,” as this choice affects all subsequent implementation steps. At the time, there were two clear options: Solana and Base.

Solana

Advantages:

· The chain with the highest meme coin trading volume;

· Spotlight effect: any project deployed here easily gets attention.

Disadvantages:

· Low implementation flexibility, must follow existing token standards;

· High development complexity, requires many workarounds;

· Long development cycle;

· High and unstable infrastructure costs.

Base

Advantages:

· The highest meme coin trading volume among EVM chains;

· Comprehensive developer support;

· Excellent EVM development experience;

· Can directly reuse existing infrastructure.

Disadvantages:

· Meme coin trading volume is not as high as Solana.

Since Blind is not a commercial project, just a weekend practice piece, we don’t need to consider “potential financial returns,” only to choose the option that “doesn’t make development too painful.” In the end, we chose EVM. When developing blockchain applications, EVM is the most mature and best-experienced blockchain infrastructure, allowing us to develop quickly, efficiently, and wisely.

Reusable Existing Infrastructure

After determining the chain, the next step is to look for reusable SDKs (software development kits) or ready-made contracts to avoid writing code from scratch. Especially for smart contracts, prioritizing audited contracts can greatly reduce security risks.

Fortunately, there are plenty of reusable resources in the EVM ecosystem. We mainly had two options:

·Develop based on DEXs like Uniswap, building all access control logic on Uniswap V4;

· Develop based on the infrastructure of existing launch platforms (such as Flaunch’s SDK), which already includes indexing, metadata uploading, launch curve configuration, stage management, and other functions.

Again, we chose the “path of least resistance”: developing based on Flaunch. This way, we can focus on the “social attributes of the launch platform + frontend display,” without wasting time and money on basic functions like pool configuration, indexing infrastructure, revenue sharing contracts, etc.

“Since smarter people have already done the work, why reinvent the wheel?”

Token Deployment Method

After determining the SDK, we need to decide “who actually executes the token deployment,” with two options:

Option 1: Users initiate transactions to deploy tokens

· Need to develop a proxy contract to ensure the issuance parameters chosen by users meet platform requirements;

· Need to find a way to track all deployed tokens in Flaunch’s existing subgraph indexer.

Option 2: Users submit a “deployment request” to the backend, and the platform bot executes deployment

· All tokens are deployed by the platform’s own EOA (externally owned account), making it easy to track all tokens issued by the platform in the indexer;

· Ensures all launches follow unified standardized parameters.

We chose the “backend service deployment” option: this makes token tracking easier and allows stricter control over “deployment content and method,” with room for upgrades in the future.

All tokens will be deployed by a wallet controlled by the backend.

Essentially, we “streamlined the Flaunch SDK,” removing all unnecessary features and keeping only the parts callable by backend requests.

Social Data Collection

Next, focus on social features. We need to determine which data dimensions are valuable for the launch platform. The ideal data combination should reflect both “user account status” and “user reputation.”

In the end, I selected the following data dimensions:

· Follower count (X platform API)

· Following count (X platform API)

· Account registration duration (X platform API)

· Like count (X platform API)

· High-value follower count (Moni API)

· Core interaction user count (Moni API)

· Reputation score (Ethos API)

· Content propagation score (Kaito API)

This combination allows creators to prove their credentials through multidimensional data without fully exposing their identities, helping them stand out.

Social Data Processing and Privacy Protection

When users register, we collect all the above data, but how should privacy be designed?

Our principle is “privacy first by default”: all data is private by default to avoid leaks; users can decide for themselves whether to make each data dimension public. In addition, users should be allowed to “blur data display” (for example, if they actually have 43,000 followers, they can choose to display “40,000+”), providing semi-anonymous data references.

Also, should data processing rely on a “centralized backend + HTTPS requests,” or use complex zero-knowledge proof technology?

Our solution is a combination of both:

· All data is stored in a Postgres database, and the frontend obtains information directly from the database via HTTPS API. Access control follows this process:

· User wants to participate → requests an “access proof” from the platform backend;

· Backend verifies whether the user meets the threshold set by the creator;

· Backend returns a signed message containing “user wallet address + expiration timestamp”;

· Smart contract verifies the validity of the signature.

Stage 2: Development Implementation

Before starting development, list the required “toolkit”:

· Railway (backend hosting): $20/month

· Vercel (frontend hosting): $15/month

· Cursor (development tool, with Claude 4 MAX mode): $200/month + $100 credits

· Website domain: $30/year

· X Premium+ (account membership, for increased exposure + long-form posting): $40/month

· ChatGPT: for logo and brand visual design, or can be replaced with other familiar tools

· Total cost about $405 (assuming Vercel does not exceed subscription limit).

Note: To speed up development, I actually used more Cursor credits than expected (enabled MAX model). If you don’t care about development speed, you can choose cheaper models.

Architecture Design

Most projects need four core components:

· Frontend: hosted on Vercel (separate GitHub repo);

· Backend: hosted on Railway (separate GitHub repo);

· Data storage database: Postgres database on Railway;

· Cache database: Redis database on Railway.

Simply put, Vercel handles all frontend-related functions; Railway securely hosts the “user-invisible” core services, such as data processing, token deployment, API interfaces, information caching, etc.

Most backend architectures look like the following (yes, the data is in the “ball”).

Development Sequence

I always recommend developing core functions first, and doing frontend display last.

For this project, the most core function (and the one that needs compatibility testing first) is token issuance.

Since we’ve determined that “the backend EOA executes token deployment,” we can create a new git repo for the backend and start delving into the Flaunch SDK documentation.

The documentation outlines all currently feasible features for launch configuration, and even provides some code snippets for easy integration. They also offer some API endpoints for retrieving data, as well as a subgraph that automatically indexes everything happening on Flaunch (including tokens launched from the Blind frontend).

1) Test Token Issuance Function

In the new backend repo, the first step is to set up the local environment and test whether tokens can be successfully issued via the SDK. We can first write a simple Node script, and later transform it into an Express server interface. By calling this interface and passing in specified parameters, token deployment can be completed.

This step is actually very simple, and can probably be done with just one prompt and a little debugging.

And the gas fee for token deployment is less than $0.01! This means we can provide users with a completely free token deployment service.

2) Fetch Social Data

The second step is to develop another core function: social scoring. For all the data dimensions selected earlier, we need to check the documentation for each API, then create an endpoint in the Express server that returns all data based on the username. Then, we can store this data in the Postgres database we created on Railway.

3) Registration Process

At this step, development becomes slightly more complex and requires simultaneous development of the frontend repo. We chose Next.js as the frontend framework because it has the best support for Vercel and supports middleware for authentication.

In the registration process, we want users to first link their wallets, then authenticate via X, and finally register by calling our endpoint.

We first check the X authentication API documentation, implement a simple registration page on the frontend, and create a registration endpoint on the backend repo.

During registration, we also need to extract all the data from step 2) and store it in the database, adding an extra wallet address entry. All requests sent to the registration endpoint should be authenticated with both X key and wallet signature to prevent identity spoofing.

Once everything works, we also need to add authentication to the token deployment endpoint so that only registered users can deploy tokens. For any endpoints outside the registration endpoint, we decided to authenticate only via wallet signature messages to avoid using X login every time.

4) Privacy Settings

After completing the registration process and implementing data storage, the next step is to develop privacy settings:

· Create a data visibility settings table in the database (all data is private by default);

· Develop a privacy settings modification interface callable by authenticated users;

· Write helper functions to support users in choosing to blur data display;

· Develop a frontend privacy settings editing component.

5) Interface Check and Optimization

Once the core services are ready, the following optimizations are needed:

All core server functions are now ready. We need to ensure that all endpoints use authentication when necessary and do not leak any personal information when accessed publicly. We can also use Redis cache to optimize some APIs to avoid unnecessary server load. Finally, we added several APIs for fetching users’ public profiles, token owners and their data, token data, etc.

6) Frontend Development

Now it’s time to create a beautiful website. We first determine the theme, the pages to display, and start removing the “private” parts. For displaying a custom-sorted token list and other data, we can rely on Flaunch’s subgraph and filter by deployer address, which serves as our EOA. For the token details page, a quick way to display charts is to embed a simple DexScreener iframe.

7) Testing

Everything is finally ready. Test the user flow, deploy everything to Vercel and Railway, and share access with friends for feedback. The goal is to create an environment identical to production.

8) Optimize Based on Feedback

This is the last step before going live.

Stage 3: Public Launch

The public launch is divided into two steps: first, build the brand, then do marketing.

Brand Building

I didn’t mention brand building before because it can be done at any time, but it’s best to complete it before frontend development. The core elements of a brand (name, logo, color scheme, domain) should follow the principle of “simplicity and easy recognition.”

One of my favorite tricks is “single-word naming + domain pun combination”:

· The project is named “Blind” (meaning “blind investment,” implying users buy tokens with limited information);

· The color scheme is deliberately chosen as a glaringly bright light mode, paired with a “beast style” design, reminiscent of Braille documents, echoing the “Blind” theme;

· Logo design: generated by ChatGPT (using the existing theme as a background prompt);

Marketing

It’s time to let the world know about our MVP (minimum viable product)! Generally, the best way to let others know is not to tell them directly, but to create confusion.

Confusion Marketing

Before formal promotion, it’s recommended to ensure the MVP is feature-complete. It’s best to start marketing a week before launch, so public attention is concentrated within a week, making it easier to dominate social platform trending topics.

The core goals of this week are:

· Get more people to follow the project’s X account and turn on notifications;

· Post vague teasers and memes, but never directly reveal project features;

· Leave “clues” so netizens spontaneously guess in the comments, letting them generate hype for you.

Vanity Metrics: Make Users Not Alone

An effective way to complement “confusion marketing” is “leaderboards”! People want to “get in early,” but don’t want to be “too early.” Your job is to “make the platform come alive before it’s even live.”

The “registration + leaderboard” campaign has the following benefits:

· Guide users to register in advance, distribute website traffic, and test system stability;

· Keep users engaged with the project: “Are there benefits for early registration?” thus turning on account notifications;

· People love the feeling of “being better than others”: leaderboard rankings are easy to share and let users discover interesting data about their accounts;

· Makes it easier for the team to publicize “growth data.”

Before Blind went live, pre-registered users exceeded 40,000!

Note: If you add an “invite link” mechanism, growth will be even faster.

24-Hour Countdown Teaser

It’s time to reveal Blind’s core features! When publishing the article, let them know so they have a specific time to look forward to. In the last 24 hours, lock in your guesses about Blind’s content. 24 hours gives people in all time zones time to prepare.

Publish Launch Article

At this point, users are refreshing your X account homepage—it’s time to publish the article! The article should clearly explain:

· The core features of Blind;

· Official launch time;

· No need to be too technical or list all features, focus on conveying “development motivation,” “core ideas,” and “project appeal”;

If you need to supplement technical details, you can provide documentation outside the article.

Stage 4: Official Launch!

The article should state “the launch time is 24 hours after the article is published.” At this point, pre-registered users are ready and just waiting to deploy tokens. Next, we need to:

· Switch all environments to production mode;

· Switch the deployer EOA account;

· Stand by at all times to deal with any errors that may occur at launch (errors always happen).

Alright, officially launched!

Summary

When developing an MVP, always choose the “path of least resistance.” There’s no need to pursue perfection in one go; you can iteratively optimize in production. Seizing the opportunity is often more important than “waiting until everything is ready.”

But also note: first impressions are crucial. The user’s first experience visiting the platform will directly determine their long-term perception of it—don’t expect most users to keep following “feature updates.”

This side project development process was very interesting. I learned a lot and created a tool that “people might use to issue tokens.”