HOOVUS

Art marketplace and auction house for emerging artists and the collectors who want to find them first. I co-founded the company and ran it as CTO for five years.

AT A GLANCE

Role: Co-founder and CTO for five years — product, platform and a share of the business strategy
What: Marketplace for emerging artists plus a live auction house
Highlight: A collaborative auction with an art dealer that put original Eduard Wiiralt works under the hammer
Status: Wound down — the platform is no longer online

THE PROBLEM

Emerging artists had galleries as their only route to collectors, and collectors had no easy way to discover and buy from new names directly. Auctions were reserved for the established.

WHAT I BUILT

A marketplace where emerging artists list works and collectors buy directly — artist profiles, catalogues, search and checkout.
A live auction system with timed lots and bidding, used for a collaborative auction with an art dealer that sold a set of original Eduard Wiiralt works alongside emerging artists.
The whole platform as CTO: the Next.js frontend, the backend and database, and the AWS hosting — TypeScript throughout.
The business side too: validating the idea, shaping strategy and running both the technical and commercial sides of a small company.

OUTCOME

Five years of building and running a startup end to end, owning both the code and the company. Hoovus has since been wound down, and it shaped how I build products now: validate before building, ship the smallest thing that sells, and measure everything.

STACK

NextJSAWSSEO

Next.js, React, styled-components, TypeScript
Express + MongoDB
AWS, Docker

NEXT STEP

Want something like this? See AI-Native MVP.

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