Podium Network

Overview

Podium Network is an influencer-marketing and talent-discovery platform built specifically for motorsport. It gives brands and agencies a searchable directory of racing drivers and teams across series like Formula 1, NASCAR, IndyCar, and F1 Academy, complete with verified social audience and engagement data. Users can search creators with natural language, build sponsorship briefs, shortlist talent, and track campaigns end to end.

The challenge

Motorsport sponsorship matchmaking is fragmented and manual. Brands struggle to discover the right drivers and teams, validate their real social reach and engagement, and run a structured sponsorship process. Generic influencer platforms are not tuned to racing series, teams, and motorsport audience signals, so the market needed a vetted, motorsport-specific directory with real analytics and a managed workflow.

What we built

• A three-part system: a React/Vite frontend, an Express/MongoDB API, and a data-ingestion layer combining an Instagram scraper with a vector embeddings pipeline.
• A MongoDB talent model with strategic compound and full-text indexes, weighted text search across name, series, and type, plus follower- and engagement-rate sort indexes, for fast directory filtering at scale.
• Third-party audience analytics through a server-side Modash API proxy that keeps creator follower and engagement intelligence keys off the client.
• AI semantic search where OpenAI embeddings generate vector representations of profiles, enabling natural-language creator discovery via Supabase edge functions and a backend vectorize/search suite.
• A subscription paywall built on Supabase edge functions and Stripe-style checkout flows, gating premium directory access, all behind a hardened API with helmet, CORS, rate limiting, sanitization, and validation.

Results

Podium Network collapses motorsport talent discovery from manual spreadsheet research into one searchable, filterable directory. Natural-language AI search lets non-technical brand teams find relevant drivers in seconds, and verified audience and engagement data improves sponsorship-fit decisions while reducing vetting effort. The end-to-end workflow, discover, brief, shortlist, track, keeps the whole sponsorship process in a single tool, with subscription gating establishing a recurring-revenue model around premium access.