Matrixbay is India’s premier celebrity management, model management and branded content company. They work with India’s leading celebrities and India’s leading brands.

Matrix reached out to DARIS, an design and development agency based out of Mumbai to develop an internal platform to manage termsheets and responses from the artists via managers. Termsheets are internal advertisement requests made by companies and brands and sent to artists and accepted or declined based on their responses and constraints given by both brands and artists. They wanted to streamline this process and also add analytics so that they can gather some data metrics and block some of the product or service categories from artists for a specific time. DARIS co-founder Maclean was the point of contact for all the additional details I wanted to know and had detailed discussions with him throughout the journey.

This platform is divided into 2 main users, the Intern Team Users will be the main users who will create and assign the termsheets and assign those termsheets to those particular artists, add or assign artists to managers and create manager accounts.

Managers are the secondary users who will be on field with artists and will provide feedback where they accept or decline the termsheet after consulting with the artist.

We first Started with an Information Architecture, created a simple guidelines based on their color scheme and designed the platform and iterated it during this process.

In this Information Architecture, we divided the platform into internal team and external team as stated earlier. We added basic functions that the internal teams are supposed to do like creating termsheets, live and past termsheets etc. The user can also add/delete/edit artists, and add/edit managers and assign artists as well. The analytics will show data in table and pie charts with a sorting function. There are 3 analytics pages to show, product categories, artist wise report and average time for managers to reply to the termsheet etc.

In the managers front, the available termsheets if any are visible, they can view the details and enter the if they accept the termsheet or not and provide the necessary feedback, they can also view their artist list to see who and how many artists they will be managing.

After the Internal Team signs in, they will be in the main termsheet dashboard and he can access Accepted Termsheets, Declined Termsheets and Archived Termsheets via Termsheets drop down in the navigation bar, in the main termsheets he will have 2 tables displayed along with create a new termsheet button and we follow the same process but instead of having just 3 types of termsheets we further classified in 6 types. They were Response Pending By Manager, Manager Responded, Declined, Archived, Published and Closed termsheets. When the termsheets are declined the user usually archives it. When the manager responds and accepts the termsheet, the internal user publishes the termsheets by altering some details based on the feedback and publishes the termsheet. After the termsheet activity is completed by the artist , it is moved to closed termsheets with final inputs. As stated above we added the option to create manager accounts and assign and edit their artists lists and add/edit artist names. The delete functions aren’t added so that the analytics aren’t affected. Since the Internal teams are in Office and due to Budget constraints, we made this desktop exclusive.

Since managers will be outside their office premises, traveling along their artists, the Managers part of the screens are designed responsively. As usual we added the sign in flow to the termsheet dashboard and can accept and decline the termsheet request sent by the internal team based on the artists feedback. The managers can also block the artists name from appearing from specific product categories for custom periods of time, or indefinitely and undo the blocking manually. Also the artist name will be blocked on certain product categories if the termsheet is exclusive and it has been accepted by the clients.

I started developing all the pages we required by design and once we started working on the logics and completed at least 60% of the application, the client side requested a project extension on top of the existing project. We revised the plan and gave the updated quote and once it was approved we started working on it. There were 3 key additions, the first one was when selecting the termsheet there are main types and subtypes and based on the selections a document was supposed to be generated based on the selection of the event type and templates, when the internal team publishes the termsheet. And the 2nd one is the same as the first one but based on the options this termsheet had, when closed a closing document is generated based on the template they provide. The third addition was on the analytics to create an agency based analytics to see how many agencies are bringing in offers and how many are getting accepted and so on. We worked on creating initial screens and logics and added these new changes and capabilities in the platform. The main challenge was finding a good document generating plugin or code to generate it without any hassle. Despite trying most of the plugins on a trial and error basis, we were hopping onto a plugin but we canceled it due to its buggy nature. At last a new plugin was released and we tested it in a free plan and it was perfect. Since it was new I contacted the Documentero team from Poland and after a few discussions on how we could improve the plugin and exchanging emails, the plugin was working smoothly.

Despite being a relatively simple project that was supposed to take 3 or 4 months to complete its project, the company's larger volume and scale took a much longer time when it came to decision making and time delay. This experience made me realize how large companies work taking approvals in all areas of the company and then send an update.

Despite the app being ready and available for quite a few months, the company’s technical IT support vendor hasn’t responded to connect with us and upload the webapps DNS records in the domain name. We hope to this gets resolved quickly.

Patience and persistence are crucial when navigating complex organizational structures.
Continuous improvement of logic workflows enhances platform functionality.
Collaborating with service providers fosters deeper software understanding and smoother integrations.