Startup Client WorkFlagship case study: Stint, London

Development and growth, engineered as one system

For Stint, the London based staffing platform connecting students with flexible hospitality work, I build and run the full growth stack: a custom operations dashboard in Ruby on Rails, a smart marketing website, and a performance data layer powered by GrowCentric.ai. Everything custom, everything talking to everything else.

This is what I mean by development with growth hacking: engineering that ships real product, combined with data science that turns every click, application and ad pound into something the team can learn from. And it is everything a conventional agency retainer is not: exact conversion figures and cost per applicant, live, not in a PDF at the end of the month. My enterprise track record also includes performance marketing for Volvo Group and campaign work for the MoD / British Army.

https://stint.co/en-gb

stint.co home page
Open stint.co live

Scroll inside the frame to browse the page, or switch pages below.

A note on the numbers you will see

Every screenshot on this page shows the real product filled with randomly generated demo data. None of the figures, campaigns or applicants reflect Stint's actual production data, which stays strictly confidential.

100%
Custom code, no off the shelf licences
3
Ad platforms synced into one view: Meta, Google, TikTok
4
Analytics destinations fired per website event
2
Products working as one: smart website + dashboard
1
Journey tracked end to end, from ad click to hired applicant
Live
Monte Carlo forecasting and hiring targets, live in the dashboard

The Challenge

High volume hiring across cities needs more than spreadsheets

Stint acquires thousands of student applicants across UK cities, reviews them, communicates with every single one, and spends real ad budget keeping the pipeline full. Most companies run growth like this on an agency retainer, half a dozen disconnected subscriptions and a monthly report nobody quite trusts. Stint runs on one custom platform where marketing, operations and data live together, and every pound of spend traces back to the applicants it produced.

Beyond The Agency Model

What a retainer never buys you

Plenty of companies hand growth marketing, growth hacking or performance marketing to an agency and hope for the best. The gap between that and an owned growth platform is not ten percent, it is a different sport.

The conventional agency setup

  • A monthly PDF with reach, impressions and a nice font, weeks after the money is spent.
  • Your campaigns, pixels and audiences live in the agency's accounts. Leave, and the learning leaves with them.
  • Success reported in clicks and CPMs, because cost per actual customer is someone else's spreadsheet.
  • A landing page tweak takes a ticket, a call and a fortnight.
  • Retainer plus media markup, billed whether it worked or not.

What Stint gets instead

  • A live dashboard where every number drills down to the single application behind it.
  • Full ownership: the code, the ad accounts, the data and every lesson learned stay with the business.
  • Exact conversion figures and cost per hired applicant, per platform, per campaign, per creative.
  • Forms and funnels edited in the dashboard in the morning, live for applicants by lunch.
  • One partner who builds the product, runs the ads and reads the data, judged on outcomes.

Smart AI, Strict Engineering

Why this costs a fraction of what it should

These products are priced like a small project and behave like enterprise software. The trick is not cheap labour, it is discipline about where AI is allowed to work and where it is not.

AI builds the visual and the non critical

Layouts, illustrations, marketing pages, copy drafts and internal admin views are generated with AI, fed with the brand guidelines and reviewed by me. A mistake here is cheap and instantly visible, so speed wins, and the cost of this work drops dramatically.

Engineering builds everything that must be right

Business logic, data engineering, statistics, attribution and payments are hand built on best practice and 20 years of development experience. A mistake here is expensive and invisible, so rigour wins over speed, every time.

TDD: tests come before code

Test Driven Development means the test that proves a feature correct is written before the feature itself. Nothing ships until every test passes, so bugs are caught at my desk, not by your users after release.

BDD: behaviour is agreed first

Behaviour Driven Development means every feature starts as a plain language scenario we agree on before anything is built. The software is then written to make exactly those scenarios pass: built precisely per definition.

What this means for you

AI speed where mistakes are cheap, engineering rigour where they are not. No vibe coded surprises, no bugs discovered after release, and a budget that goes visibly further.

One Platform

Everything Stint needs to acquire, manage and learn from applicants

Jump straight into any part of the system. The smart website feeds the dashboard, the dashboard feeds the data layer, and the insights flow back into marketing decisions.

Smart Marketing Website

City aware landing pages with modal application funnels and full event tracking.

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Form Builder

Custom application forms, built in the dashboard, live on the website in minutes.

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Applicant Pipeline

Every submission reviewed, staged and processed in one place.

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Automated Communications

On brand confirmations, rejections and SMS, sent automatically.

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Email Campaign Engine

Scheduled campaigns with safety rails and deliverability tracking.

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Marketing Performance

Meta, Google and TikTok spend and results, synced daily into one view.

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UTM & Attribution

From ad click to hired applicant, one consistent tracking trail.

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Audience Builder

Seed audiences built from applicants and accepted hires, synced to Meta, Google and TikTok for retargeting and lookalikes.

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UTM Performance

Because every channel reports in the same currency, submissions and cost per hire, a poster at a bus stop competes directly with a TikTok campaign.

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A/B Testing Lab

Compare any campaigns and get a statistical verdict with the margin of error spelled out.

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Forecasting & Goals

Monte Carlo budget forecasts and per form hiring targets with best and worst case.

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Website & API

Forms, promotions and tracking flow between website and dashboard through one API.

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Data Engineering

Monitored pipelines, background jobs and sync health checks.

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Admin & Settings

Everything that changes with the business is a setting, not a development task.

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The Smart Website

A marketing site that behaves like a product

stint.co is not a brochure. It is the top of the hiring funnel: city aware, conversion focused, and wired directly into the dashboard, so a form the team edits in the morning is live for applicants by lunch.

City Aware Application Funnels

Application forms are managed in the dashboard and served per city. A Manchester campaign gets a Manchester funnel, national campaigns get a generic one, all without touching code.

Modal First Journeys

Applications open in modals right where the visitor already is. No page reloads, no lost context, and a funnel that keeps momentum from first click to submitted form. Every step is measured, so drop off has a number, not a vibe.

Every Event Tracked

Scroll depth, video engagement, app downloads and form steps fire to GA4, Meta, Fathom and TikTok in a single call, automatically enriched with UTM parameters.

Smart App Routing

Store links route each visitor to the right app on the right platform, and every download click is attributed back to the campaign that earned it.

What this means for you

A website that tells you exactly where visitors drop out of the funnel, which form step loses them and what each completed application costs. Not a pretty brochure, a measurable machine.

The public application funnel: multi step, modal first, fully tracked · Click to enlarge
Website promotions and WhatsApp share modals, managed centrally in the dashboard · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

The Form Builder

Custom application forms, built like campaigns

Every hiring push gets its own form: own steps, own fields, own city. Because the dashboard builds and hosts the forms itself, every submission arrives already wired to the ad that paid for it, and that is what makes cost per hire measurable at all.

Steps, Fields & Logic

Multi step forms with required fields, conditional visibility and automatic rejection rules, so unqualified applicants get a kind answer instantly instead of clogging the pipeline.

City Bound Funnels

Forms are generic or bound to a city. Campaign traffic lands on the funnel that matches its targeting, which keeps both conversion rates and attribution clean.

Ad Level Conversion Tracking

Every submission captures its UTM parameters and platform click ids, so conversions attribute back to the exact ad, not just the channel.

Locked When Live

A form with real applicants locks against edits; duplicating creates the next version. Historical data stays trustworthy by construction.

What this means for you

A new city campaign can have its own tailored funnel live in an afternoon, with conversion tracking wired in from the very first click.

The form builder: steps, fields, validation and auto rejection rules · Click to enlarge
Form analytics: completion rate, drop off and device split for every funnel · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

Operations

From raw submission to hired Stinter, without the chaos

Every application lands in one reviewable pipeline inside the dashboard. The operations team sees what is new, what needs a decision, and what happened last, the moment they log in.

One Inbox For Every Applicant

Submissions from every form and every city land in a single pipeline, with duplicate detection and spam filtering built in so reviewers only see real candidates.

Stages, Buckets & Lead Status

Applicants move through configurable stages and buckets, so it is always clear who is new, in review, accepted or rejected, and who owns the next step.

Interviews Built In

Interview scheduling and outcomes live next to the application itself, not in a separate calendar tool nobody checks.

Bulk Actions & Imports

Historical imports and bulk operations handle the busy weeks, with import logs keeping every change accountable.

What this means for you

No more leads dying in inboxes and spreadsheets. Every enquiry lands in one queue with an owner, a status and a paper trail, so nothing slips through and nobody wonders who was supposed to reply.

The applicant pipeline: every submission with status, owner and history · Click to enlarge
The answer first home screen: new applicants, spend and issues at a glance · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

Communication

Kind, on brand and automatic

High volume hiring means high volume communication. Stint answers every applicant, including the ones who do not make it, with brand designed messages the team edits themselves.

Editable Email Templates

Confirmations, responses and rejection emails are managed in settings with placeholders and test sends. Marketing changes copy without a deploy.

Automated Rejection Flow

Every applicant receives a considered, well designed answer, even when it is a no. Respectful at scale, and good for the employer brand.

SMS Where It Counts

Text messages cover the moments where email is too slow, with the same safety rails as everything else.

What this means for you

Every customer and candidate gets a proper, on brand answer without anyone typing it. Your response time drops to minutes, your brand looks sharp, and your team gets their evenings back.

Email At Scale

Bulk email through Mandrill, with airbags everywhere

Beyond transactional email, the dashboard runs full bulk campaigns through Mandrill: import a CSV of recipients, pick a Mailchimp template, send now or schedule for later. Built for a marketing team's pace, with the guardrails of a payments system.

CSV In, Send Now Or Schedule

Recipient lists arrive as CSV imports and campaigns go out immediately or at a scheduled moment. Everything queued is visible before it happens, per recipient.

Mailchimp Templates, Loaded Live

Templates are designed in Mailchimp and loaded straight into the dashboard, brand design and merge variables included. Marketing keeps the tools they already know.

Mandrill Friendly Batching

Big sends are cut into packages sized for what Mandrill digests best, with per batch retries and recovery for stuck campaigns, so a ten thousand recipient send is boringly reliable.

CSV Validated Against The Template

Before a single email leaves, every CSV column is checked against the template's variables. A template expecting a first name with a CSV that has none simply cannot be sent.

One Switch Stops Everything

Test mode, scheduling holds and a development safety net make wrong sends structurally hard, and a single hold switch pauses ALL scheduled sending instantly when something needs a second look.

Post Send Reporting

After the send: who received it, who opened it, what bounced or failed and why, per recipient. Problems surface on the home screen, not in a support ticket.

What this means for you

Email marketing at scale without the horror stories, and without paying an email platform per contact per month. The list, the templates and the sending history are yours.

Marketing Performance

Three ad platforms, one truth

Stint advertises on Meta, Google and TikTok. Instead of three logins and three currencies of truth, performance lands in one place, next to the applicants it produces, on a home screen that answers one question: is there anything I need to look at?

Daily Insight Syncs

Campaign performance from Meta, Google and TikTok is pulled in daily and stored in one consistent schema, with sync health monitored so nobody makes decisions on silently outdated numbers.

Exact Cost Per Conversion

No blended averages: spend, applications and cost per applicant, broken down per platform, per campaign and per creative, sitting right next to the operations data they feed.

A/B Testing With A Verdict

Ad variants and audiences are tested against actual submitted applications, not clicks. The dashboard shows which variant wins and by how much, so the next budget decision is already made.

Platforms Compared Fairly

Meta, Google and TikTok report in one schema and one currency of truth, so you can see which platform delivers applicants cheapest this month and shift spend without a debate.

What this means for you

One screen that shows what an acquisition actually costs you on each platform, which ad variant wins, and where the next pound should go. That conversation with your agency where nobody quite knows? Gone.

Powered by GrowCentric.ai

The performance tracking layer, data engineering, warehousing and analysis, comes from GrowCentric.ai, the growth platform I am building. Stint gets product grade analytics without hiring a BI team.

Learn more
Marketing performance: three platforms, one spend and conversion view · Click to enlarge
Campaign analysis: spend, conversions, CTR and CPC per campaign · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

Attribution

From ad click to hired applicant

Growth without attribution is guesswork. Every link, event and application at Stint carries consistent campaign data, so budget decisions follow evidence.

Campaign Wizard

New campaigns are created through a wizard that enforces naming and UTM conventions from day one. No more mystery traffic.

UTM Everywhere

Every website event and form submission carries its UTM context automatically, across web, modals and app store redirects.

Closed Loop

Applications are attributable back to platform and campaign, connecting ad spend to the applicants it actually produced.

What this means for you

An end to 'we think it was Instagram'. Every applicant traces back to the exact ad and campaign that earned them, so you know your true cost per conversion and cut the spend that only looked good.

Attribution: forms and ad campaigns connected, spend tied to submissions · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

Audience Builder

Audiences that build themselves

Every applicant makes the next campaign smarter. The dashboard turns application data into seed audiences and pushes them to Meta, Google and TikTok automatically, ready for retargeting and lookalike targeting.

Automatic seed audiences

Two living audiences per platform, all applicants and accepted applicants, rebuilt from the live pipeline on every sync. No exports, no spreadsheets, no manual uploads.

Privacy first sync

Emails and phone numbers are SHA256 hashed before upload and raw data never leaves the dashboard. Each platform syncs independently and every run is logged on the Audiences page.

Retargeting and lookalikes

Warm applicants become retargeting pools and accepted applicants become the seed for lookalike and similar audiences, so Meta, Google and TikTok find more of the people who actually get hired.

What this means for you

Your best hires quietly recruit the next ones. The ad platforms stop guessing who should see your ads and start from a list of people who already applied and got accepted, which lowers cost per applicant with zero extra work.

UTM Performance

Every channel measured, from posters to TikTok

A campaign is not only an ad platform. The dashboard mints tracked links for any channel: a QR code on a poster, a newspaper ad, a university newsletter, a banner on a partner website, a TikTok push. Every link carries the same UTM convention, so offline and online land in the same tables and compete on equal terms.

Links For Any Channel

Offline or online makes no difference: posters, newspaper ads, flyers with QR codes, partner websites, newsletters and paid social all get their own tracked link, minted with a naming convention the wizard enforces.

One Scoreboard For Everything

Because every channel reports in the same currency, submissions and cost per hire, a poster at a bus stop competes directly with a TikTok campaign. Efficiency and effectiveness are compared side by side, not argued about.

Forms, Campaigns & Modals Included

Application forms, generic campaigns and website modals all report into the same UTM ledger: views, starts, submissions and hires, attributed automatically the moment a tagged link is clicked.

What this means for you

Marketing finally answers the oldest question in the book: which half of the budget works? Posters, papers and paid social are measured with the same ruler, and the losers are cut with confidence, not gut feeling.

Form and campaign attribution: every channel detected automatically via UTM · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

The A/B Lab

Which campaign is actually better? Now with proof

Staff pick any campaigns, across Meta, Google and TikTok, and the lab judges them on rates, never raw totals, so a small campaign and a big one compare fairly. The verdict is a probability with its margin of error, in plain language.

Fair By Construction

Clicks per impression, submissions per click, accepted per submission, cost per result: everything is normalised per impression, click and pound before anything is compared.

Verdicts With Confidence

A clear winner is only called at 95% or higher probability, shown as a sentence anyone can read, with every rate carrying its own margin of error.

Knows When To Say Not Yet

Thin data is displayed but never judged, and when a test is too close to call the lab says roughly how many more clicks would settle it.

What this means for you

Creative and budget decisions stop being debates. The better campaign wins on evidence, and tests stop exactly when the data is conclusive.

The A/B Lab calling a clear winner across platforms, with margins of error · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

Forecasting & Goals

From gut feeling to best case, expected, worst case

Every campaign carries a 30 day outlook simulated 2,000 times from its own history, and every application form can carry a hiring target: how many accepted applicants are needed, and by when. The dashboard answers in days and pounds, and refuses to invent precision when history is too thin.

Monte Carlo Outlooks

The next 30 days are simulated from the campaign's own recent days, weekday patterns included. Best and worst case are the 10th and 90th percentile: reality lands between them about 8 times out of 10.

Hiring Targets Per Form

Staff set a target and an optional deadline on any form. The dashboard shows progress, days to target at the current pace, and a plain on track or behind pace verdict.

Budget Answers

What would the remaining hires cost through ads at recent cost per accepted? What daily budget does the deadline require? Answered with best and worst case, not a single fragile number.

What this means for you

Hiring targets become plans with dates and budgets attached, and surprises are caught weeks before they happen.

Powered by GrowCentric.ai

The forecasting engine is the GrowCentric.ai data layer at work: data engineering, data analysis, and now data prediction, live inside Stint's dashboard.

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A campaign's 30 day outlook: spend, submissions and accepted applicants · Click to enlarge
A hiring target with progress, forecast and required daily budget · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

Website & API

Two products, one nervous system

stint.co and the dashboard talk through one API. Forms built in the dashboard are served on the website, promotions and modals are delivered live, tracking events flow back with their UTM context, and server side conversions go out to the ad platforms. Change something in the dashboard and the website follows, no deploy needed.

Hosted Form Endpoints

Public apply pages and modal funnels are served by the dashboard itself, with honeypots, geo checks, duplicate detection and double submit protection built in.

Live Promotion Delivery

The website pulls its active modals and promotions from the dashboard: which campaign, which pages, how often per visitor, including WhatsApp share flows.

Server Side Conversions

Every application fires server side events to Meta's Conversions API and GA4, with click ids attached for match quality, so ad platforms optimise on real outcomes.

What this means for you

Marketing moves at its own speed. Website changes, new funnels and new promotions never wait for a development cycle.

Data Engineering

Reliable pipelines. The good kind of boring

None of the shiny parts work without plumbing. Syncs, imports and sends all run as monitored background jobs, and the platform is built to degrade gracefully instead of falling over.

Background Everything

Insight syncs, imports and campaign sends run as background jobs with retries, failure tracking and alerting.

Graceful Degradation

If one data source breaks, its section politely reports it while the rest of the platform keeps working. Operations never lose access to their tools.

Full Auditability

Message logs, import logs and page level analytics keep every action traceable. When something looks odd, the answer is in the data, not in guesswork.

What this means for you

Numbers you can bet budget on, because the plumbing behind them is monitored, retried and audited. When a figure looks odd, you get an answer, not a shrug.

Powered by GrowCentric.ai

The pipeline architecture and data model follow the GrowCentric.ai playbook: the same engineering that powers competitor intelligence and forecasting for eCommerce runs Stint's performance data.

Learn more

Admin & Settings

Configured in settings, not coded in sprints

The rule across the whole platform: anything that changes with the business lives in settings, not in code. Email templates, rejection reasons, cities, buckets, budgets, sync schedules, user roles: staff change them in the admin area and the change is live. No developer required, no invoice attached.

Everything Is A Setting

Templates, buckets and stages, cities and locations, monthly budgets, sync toggles and safety switches: all editable in the admin area, each with sensible guardrails so a typo cannot take anything down.

Roles, Permissions & Security

Every user gets exactly the sections they need, as view or manage access, with two factor authentication on top and logs that keep every action accountable.

Usage Analytics

The dashboard measures itself: which sections staff actually use, which features get ignored, where time is spent. What gets built next is decided on evidence of what is genuinely useful, not on assumptions.

What this means for you

The platform evolves at the speed of a settings change. Development time goes into new capability, never into changing an email text or adding a city.

Usage analytics: how staff actually use the dashboard, by section and day · Click to enlarge

Screenshots show the live product filled with randomised demo data. Real applicant and client figures stay confidential.

The Approach

Build. Measure. Grow.

One person, both halves: production grade development and the data science to grow what it builds. That combination is the whole point.

1
Build
Custom Ruby on Rails development: the operations dashboard, the smart marketing website and the public application funnels, tailored to how Stint actually works instead of how a generic tool thinks they should.
2
Measure
Data engineering and analysis through GrowCentric.ai: every event, application and ad pound captured in one consistent data layer the team can trust.
3
Grow
Growth hacking on top of the data: funnel experiments, budget decisions backed by attribution, A/B verdicts with statistical confidence, and Monte Carlo forecasting of applicant supply, live today.

Testimonials

What the team at Stint says

The people who work with the platform every day, in their own words.

Sara Rida

Sara Rida

Screening Team Lead, Stint

The application forms and the screening pipeline were built around how my team actually works. Every application lands in one place, and because the forms are tied into marketing we know exactly what an accepted applicant costs us. That used to be guesswork.
Gemma Kindness

Gemma Kindness

Brand Lead, Stint

I have worked with Georg for years, first handing over designs he turned into our live website, now leading brand and a growing team. I bring the requirements, he comes back with a plan, honest advice on the technical side and a working product. That rhythm is a big part of what lets us grow.
Hamza Naseem

Hamza Naseem

AI & Marketing, Stint

Attribution across Meta, Google and TikTok finally agrees with reality, and the A/B lab tells me when a result is real rather than noise. The newest part is my favourite: the dashboard builds our retargeting and lookalike seed audiences automatically and pushes them to all three platforms.

Want a platform like this behind your business?

If your growth runs on an agency report, spreadsheets and gut feel, there is a better way: custom software built around your process, a funnel you can measure step by step, and exact figures for what every new customer costs you to win. Fancy that behind your business? Pop me a message.