Social challenge platform

The idea

What if online debates had real stakes?

The product turns an online callout into a structured challenge. A user chooses an X account, puts money behind the challenge, and gives the target a chance to accept and respond.

End-to-end

I built the entire product myself.

I designed and developed the complete experience, from the social feed and challenge composer to the realtime backend, wallet, PayPal integration, X API, authentication, and production UX.

The core system

A social post becomes a stateful workflow.

The interesting part is what happens after the post is published. The challenge moves through explicit states as the crowd contributes, the target responds, and the challenge reaches completion.

1. 01

   Create challenge

2. 02

   Fund stake

3. 03

   Crowd contributes

4. 04

   Target accepts

5. 05

   Target responds

6. 06

   Approval

7. 07

   Payout

Money

The challenge has a real financial layer.

Users fund their wallets through PayPal, use those balances to stake or contribute to challenges, and the resulting pot can eventually move to the target's wallet.

1. 01

   PayPal

2. 02

   User wallet

3. 03

   Initial stake

4. 04

   Crowd contributions

5. 05

   Challenge pot

6. 06

   Target wallet

X integration

Built around real X identities.

Users can look up an X account directly inside the challenge composer. The platform retrieves profile information such as username, avatar, verification, followers, and other public account data before the challenge is created.

Realtime

The whole product stays in sync.

Convex powers the realtime data layer, so challenge states, contributions, wallet information, and other changes update through reactive queries instead of polling.

UX

Complex under the hood. Simple in the interface.

The challenge composer progressively guides users through authentication, challenge text, target selection, stake amount, wallet funding, and publishing. The primary CTA changes based on exactly what is missing.

Under the hood

A compact stack connecting social and financial systems.

Next.js and React power the product experience, Convex handles realtime state and backend mutations, Clerk manages identity, X provides account discovery, and PayPal provides wallet funding.

1. 01

   Next.js + React

2. 02

   Clerk

3. 03

   Convex

4. 04

   Twitter API

5. 05

   PayPal

6. 06

   Svix

Engineering

The hard part was making all of it behave like one product.

Authentication, X identity, realtime state, wallet balances, payment events, crowd contributions, challenge transitions, and payout logic all have different failure modes. The challenge was connecting them without making the user experience feel like a collection of separate systems.

The result

A social product where words can carry real stakes.

I took a fairly unusual product idea — putting real money behind social challenges — and built the complete system around it, from the social feed and X integration to wallet funding, crowd contributions, challenge state management, and payout.

Features

• Challenge lifecycle

  Published challenges move through active, accepted, response submitted, completed, or cancelled. The author controls completion. The target must accept before responding. Payout needs a linked X identity.

• Wallet

  USD wallets with PayPal deposits, challenge funding, crowd contributions, and transaction history. Balances are stored in cents and cannot go negative. The client is never trusted to write financial state.

• PayPal deposits

  Order creation, capture, pending/completed/failed transactions, sandbox and production, and request idempotency. Capture credits the wallet on the server.

• X account lookup

  Twitter API v2 handle lookup with profile, verification, followers, avatar, and location. Handles are normalized, responses are cached for five minutes, and API errors are handled explicitly.

• Crowd funding

  Anyone can add money and an optional message. The pot, contribution count, and realtime feed update together.

• Target experience

  Connected X users get a dedicated flow: callout-for-you, accept or reject, response textarea, and a waiting state until completion.

• Social feed and sharing

  A public newest-first feed of challenge cards, plus share to X, WhatsApp, Facebook, or clipboard with stake, handle, and public URL.

• Progressive composer

  The CTA tracks what's missing: login, challenge text, X user, amount, wallet top-up, then publish. Low balance drops the user into funding before they can post.

• Clerk + Svix

  Email and X OAuth, protected routes, identity linking, and user.created / updated / deleted webhooks to keep Convex in sync.

Outcomes

• Complete product design
• End-to-end full-stack development
• Convex realtime backend
• Twitter API v2 and X OAuth
• Clerk authentication
• PayPal wallet and cents-based money model
• Crowd-funded challenge pots
• Challenge state machine
• Target accept/reject and response flow
• Approval and payout workflow
• Realtime feed and wallet
• X / WhatsApp / Facebook sharing
• Responsive UI with dark / light / system themes
• SEO and social metadata