Five Platforms, One Hour a Month
Custom software that turns raw assets into short-form video and publishes it everywhere
A marketing agency made and posted short-form video by hand. We built the platform that does both, on five platforms, for about an hour of upkeep a month.
What the agency needed
The agency posted short-form video for several client accounts by hand: make the clip, resize it, caption it, upload it, repeat for every platform. Schedulers like Buffer only solve the upload. The real bottleneck was production. We built a platform around three inputs: a background video, a music track and a list of titles. It composes clips server-side, prepares a native version per channel and publishes on schedule. Spring Boot, Next.js, MongoDB and in-app OAuth. Upkeep: about one hour a month.
Constraints we had to design around
- 01
Production, not publishing, was the bottleneck
Time was lost before scheduling even started. The system had to generate the video, not just upload finished files.
- 02
Five platforms, five rulebooks
YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, Threads, Reddit and Telegram all differ in format, text limits and API behaviour.
- 03
OAuth that doesn't silently die
Every connected account needs token refresh, expiry handling and a clear re-auth flow. A broken credential could not quietly stop a queue.
- 04
A missed post is a visible failure
When publishing fails, the agency's client sees the gap. Publish tracking and error visibility had to be part of the product from day one.
Architecture and what we shipped
- 01
Video generation from three inputs
Background video, music track, list of content entries. The backend composes finished short-form clips from that, server-side.
- 02
Campaign-based data model
Assets, schedules and content lists are grouped by campaign, which maps directly to how agencies already manage client accounts.
- 03
Native output per platform
No copy-paste cross-posting. Each channel gets its own caption, metadata and output format through a dedicated publisher.
- 04
OAuth handled inside the product
Users connect accounts in the UI. The platform tracks token state and refresh cycles and flags re-auth needs before a queue breaks.
- 05
Per-item, per-platform publish status
The dashboard shows the status of every post on every platform, with the failure reason, so the team fixes problems before clients notice.
- 06
Publisher modules that extend without a rewrite
Version one covered YouTube and Instagram. Threads, Reddit and Telegram were added later as new publishers without touching the core.
Shipped in three phases
Each phase delivered something the agency could use in production before the next layer was added.
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Phase 1
Core publishing
OAuth for YouTube and Instagram, campaigns, scheduling and the first publishing engine
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Phase 2
Video generation
Server-side video composition from uploaded assets and content lists
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Phase 3
Platform expansion
Threads, Reddit and Telegram added with separate posting logic
Outcome
Per month to maintain active publishing across five platforms
Platforms run from one internal publishing system
Manual work removed from the agency's weekly workflow
Questions teams ask about content automation
How is custom content automation different from Buffer or Hootsuite?
Those tools schedule content that already exists. This platform also produces the video from raw assets and prepares a native version for each channel, which is where the agency was actually losing time.
What does a user have to upload?
A background video, a music track and a list of titles with short descriptions. Composition, formatting and publishing are handled by the system.
What happens when a post fails to publish?
The dashboard shows the failure and the reason, such as an expired token or an API error. Nothing is lost silently, and the operator can re-authenticate or retry from the UI.
Can new platforms be added later?
Yes. Publishers are separate modules on a shared core. Threads, Reddit and Telegram were added after launch without rebuilding the platform.
Can you build a similar automation system for our team?
Yes. If your team repeats the same production or distribution steps every week, we scope the workflow on a free call and quote a fixed price for the first working version.
Service: Custom software development
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Still doing the same 10 steps by hand every week?
Show us the workflow. We'll tell you what can be automated and quote a fixed price for the system that does it.