27 December-9 January: MVP 1 and first validation -> straight into testing

CaseCrest

This fortnight turned CaseCrest from a polished shell into a real MVP. The focus was backend wiring, product breadth and enough production infrastructure to start showing the platform to users and hosts.

Product

• Deployed the frontend through a hosting platform and continued tightening the app shell.
• Wired managed auth into the app, including session handling, guards and onboarding.
• Moved competition discovery/detail pages onto real database-backed flows with visibility and status rules.
• Built core team flows: creation, members, invitations and team submission pages.
• Added judge invitations, host assignment tools, scoring, result aggregation and publish/unpublish flows.
• Added secure submission storage, finalisation and database policies so core mutations ran through RPCs instead of direct writes.
• Connected large parts of the competition creation wizard to the backend.
• Set up separate dev/prod backend thinking, password recovery, seeded test competitions and early events functionality.

GTM and validation

User testing outreach started, the first interviews were run and early host interest began to validate the problem. The direction also broadened slightly: CaseCrest was still anchored in competitions, but discovery, events, resources and early-career opportunities were becoming part of the broader student opportunity layer.

Open gaps

The first MVP was useful, but not yet stable enough. Key-date enforcement still needed backend hardening, dashboard data still had mock paths, host override tools were missing, and the product needed more testing before larger rollout.

Next

The next priority is quality: reduce friction, run more user tests, fix the obvious product gaps and turn host interest into a repeatable pipeline.