Ancient Wisdom Society
A founder's AI-built quiz prototype became a paid mobile product, every payment protected
Ancient Wisdom Society sells a movie-like past life quiz to people arriving from social ads on their phones. We took the founder's AI-built prototype to a live paid product, then moved its content into a CMS he runs himself.
Marketing & MediaPaid cinematic quiz web appModernized a live product
- Who uses it
- Visitors from social ads, on their phones
- What shipped
- Cinematic quiz, payments, instant results, CMS
- Pricing
- Country prices, edited by the founder
- Safeguard
- Recovery job checks every paid session
The challenge
A creative concept and a prototype had to become a paid product that plays smoothly on any phone, takes payment and delivers the result at once, then lets the founder run it alone.
What we did
A cinematic quiz with continuous audio, a database-level paywall, Stripe country pricing and instant results, then a migration of all content into a self-service CMS behind a flag.
The outcome
Live payments ran from the first phase, and the CMS and sharing reached production before the founder's marketing launch, with a recovery job behind every paid session.
The starting point
Ancient Wisdom Society sells a paid, cinematic personality quiz. Visitors arrive from social ads on their phones, answer illustrated questions over scene music and pay to unlock one of about 200 results.
What had to change
The founder had the vision, artwork, music, quiz content and a prototype built in an AI app builder, but no production application. It had to take real payments, deliver every result, and later run without a developer.
What could not break
- Mobile first in 9:16 for ad traffic, on iPhone and many Android brands
- Continuous scene audio through phone locks, calls and tab switches
- No registration or login, only an email at the paywall
- The result shown on screen right after payment, with email only as backup
- The founder owns the database and billing accounts
The calls we made
We treated the quiz as content and the payment as a promise: content lives in data, and no customer pays without a saved result.
- 01
Content and scoring as data from the first week
The two-part scoring, an archetype plus a region, and all quiz content were kept as data, not code, so the second phase became a migration rather than a rebuild.
Ruled outHardcoding questions and scores into the app.
- 02
Paywall enforced in the database
Anonymous sessions with Row-Level Security gate paid content at the database level, so a result cannot be reached without a confirmed payment and nobody needs an account.
Ruled outUser accounts, which add friction for ad traffic.
- 03
Migrate to the CMS behind a flag
The live quiz moved from code into the database behind a flag and was checked for parity against the hardcoded version before the switch, while payments kept running.
Ruled outA rewrite of a product that was already taking payments.
- 04
Layered safeguards over one success path
After a customer lost connection at the last question, we added three layers: no payment without a saved result, no email without a real result, and a job that repairs any paid session missing one.
Ruled outTrusting the browser to finish every step.
- 05
Automation reports, people move money
A watcher reconciles sessions against Stripe and alerts the team channel, but refunds stay a one-click manual action, by the founder's choice.
Ruled outAutomatic refunds, and a capacity figure we had not tested.
How the system fits together
What we built
A quiz that plays like a film
An intro, about 15 illustrated questions and 11 transitions, with scene music and ambient sound that crossfade and survive phone locks, calls and tab switches on iPhone and many Android devices.
Payment and instant results
Stripe Checkout with Apple Pay and country pricing, the result card and PDF unlocked on screen, an email backup and a unique result link in case the email is mistyped.
Self-service CMS
Quiz and question management, a scoring reference, result mapping, a media library, prices for 94 countries, email templates and sharing settings, all live without a deploy.
Delivery safeguards
A payment pre-check, result-dependent email, a recovery job every 15 minutes, Stripe reconciliation alerts, and admin buttons to resend email, view a result or refund.
How it works
Play
A visitor from an ad plays the quiz on a phone, with no account and scene audio throughout.
Score
Answers are scored into an archetype and a region, and the result is saved before checkout.
Pay
Stripe Checkout charges the price set for the visitor's country, with Apple Pay where available.
Deliver
The result card and PDF unlock on screen, and an email with a unique link follows as backup.
Repair
Every 15 minutes a job finds any paid session missing a result, fixes it and alerts the team.
What changed
The quiz took live payments from the first phase, with continuous audio on phones that the founder had been told was not possible. The CMS and sharing reached production before his marketing launch, and every paid session is now either delivered or repaired.
Under the hood
- Datics role
- Product built by Datics
- Payments
- Stripe Checkout, Apple Pay and Stripe webhooks, with reconciliation alerts posted to the team channel and refunds kept manual.
- Data and access
- Supabase Postgres in the founder's own account, anonymous sessions and Row-Level Security gating paid content.
- Media and hosting
- Server-rendered app on AWS EC2, media and result files on S3 behind CloudFront, videos re-encoded for iPhone, uploads capped and resized.
Data and retrieval
Cloud and infrastructure
Apps and APIs
Also in the stack
How it shipped
Discovery
A requirements meeting with the founder split the work into a first phase for the paid quiz and a second for the CMS and analytics.
Phase 1: the paid quiz
Scoring, payments, media hosting and an admin dashboard, then mobile QA across devices and a switch to live payments in the founder's own accounts.
Phase 2: CMS and sharing
The quiz moved into the database behind a flag, then the CMS, country pricing posters, analytics and share cards shipped to staging for review.
Hardening and launch
Delivery safeguards and a recovery job, load tests, then the second phase merged to production ahead of the founder's marketing launch.
Proposals the founder could check
Each phase started from a written proposal and scope the founder approved, with the result link and the modular engine proposed from the first meeting.
Staging before production
Separate testing and production environments, each change reviewed by the founder on staging before it merged.
AI in delivery, not in the product
We started from the founder's AI-built prototype and used AI coding tools in the build, while every payment path was tested by hand.
What this unlocked
The engine was built so the first quiz becomes a template, and the founder has more quizzes planned on the same platform.
Related work
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