What happens on a bad connection?

The upload pipeline uses adaptive chunking and background sync so a video submission survives a 3G connection, with quality optimisation cutting file size by up to 65% while preserving the visual detail a buyer needs.

When do contributors get paid?

On purchase, rather than on a traditional media payment cycle. That is the difference between a contributor submitting once and submitting regularly.

Marketplace

Presshop

Citizen journalism marketplace connecting contributors with verified press desks, with authenticity metadata and direct payment.

Country: India
Platform: Android, Web

About the client

Presshop

The most important news often happens where professional journalists are not. Presshop lets anyone nearby capture it, submit to verified press outlets, and be paid for the work.

Client background: A media startup building a three-sided marketplace between contributors, press desks and itself.
Business model: Marketplace taking a margin on content purchased by press desks.
Target audience: Citizen contributors with smartphones, and newsroom picture desks.

Research & discovery

What we learned before building

Discovery ran before a line of production code. These are the findings that changed the brief.

User Research
Contributors will capture something once out of curiosity. Whether they do it twice depends entirely on being paid quickly and knowing the submission was received. Payment speed turned out to be a retention feature, not a finance detail.
Competitor Analysis
Existing routes for citizen footage are social platforms, where the contributor is not paid, and agency wires, which are closed to non-professionals. Nothing connected the two ends with verification in between.
Market Analysis
Newsrooms have cut staff photographers while their appetite for on-the-ground visuals has grown. The gap is not supply of images, it is trust in images — which made verification the product rather than a feature.
Journey Mapping
Mapping a submission from event to publication exposed the weak link: the upload. Breaking news happens where bandwidth is worst, so an upload that fails silently loses both the story and the contributor.

Our solution

The decisions we made

Each one traceable to a constraint above, not to a preference.

Open media tasks broadcast by press desks, with a geofence check on acceptance.

An upload pipeline using adaptive chunking and background sync to survive 3G.

Timestamp, GPS coordinates and camera specs appended automatically for verification.

Direct monetisation so contributors are paid on purchase, not on a media payment cycle.

Key features

What Presshop does

Everything shipped and in production, not a roadmap.

Accept open tasks
Press desks broadcast what they need covered.
Geofence verification
Confirms the contributor was actually there.
Resilient upload
Adaptive chunking and background sync over 3G.
Automatic metadata
Timestamp, GPS and camera specs for verification.
Review queue
Buyers see submissions within seconds of upload.
Direct payout
Paid on purchase rather than on a media cycle.

Technology stack

What it runs on

The choices behind the build, grouped by layer.

Frontend: React Native
Backend: Node.js
Database: MongoDB
Cloud: AWS

Results

What it does today

Smaller uploads, detail preserved: 65%

Source: project write-up.

Screens

Inside the product

FAQ

Common questions

Accepting a task triggers a geofence check confirming the contributor is physically close enough to produce authentic material, and every submission carries timestamp, GPS coordinates and device camera specs appended automatically for verification.

More work