01 - The brief
LimbMatch started as a simple one-pager, built purely to explain the concept clearly enough for the client to secure funding. Once that funding came through, the ambition grew with it — the client realised they wanted a full-stack members platform with genuinely powerful front-end search, not just a marketing site with a contact form.
That meant designing for three distinct member types — manufacturers, clinics, and individual users — some sitting behind tiered pricing, some not. And underneath all of it, a substantial amount of custom scripting to make cross-site functionality actually work: onboarding logic, data pipelines, dashboards, notifications — the kind of infrastructure a brochure site never needs and a platform can't function without.
02 - The first impression
"Lived experience is expertise" and a trust bar — no clinical bias, zero paid promotion, honest by design — load before any search box or feature does. For a platform mediating between manufacturers and the people who rely on their products, skepticism about bias is the first objection to clear, so it's addressed before the product itself is shown.
03 - Brand + Tone
The branding evolved deliberately alongside the project itself — what started as a simple, explanatory identity built to win funding could afford to lean into a more considered, modern brand once the idea had proven itself and the platform had real budget behind it. The visual identity today reflects a funded product, not a pitch deck.
04 - Structure + Flow
The core user problem is decision paralysis — too many devices, not enough reliable comparison — so the platform is built around search (by limb type, activity level, funding stream) rather than a curated homepage feed. Three separate member types each get their own dashboard and onboarding path, because a manufacturer listing a product, a clinic managing a profile, and a wearer comparing devices are doing fundamentally different jobs on the same platform.
05 - The details
Multi-step onboarding forms carry conditional logic per member type, so a manufacturer isn't asked clinic-specific questions and vice versa — each of the three signup paths only ever surfaces fields relevant to that user, keeping a genuinely complex signup process from feeling like one long generic form.
06 - The build
Auth & membership
Memberstack handles authentication across all three member types, with separate plan and price IDs mapped per tier for manufacturers and clinics — individual wearer accounts sit outside the paid tier structure entirely.
Source of truth
Supabase is the backend database behind everything — Webflow CMS handles public-facing display, but Supabase is where the real data lives, including the profile_events table powering the insights dashboards.
Bulk data ingestion
A bulk device upload Excel template with built-in validation feeds a Make scenario that ingests the CSV, inserts rows into Supabase, then creates the corresponding Webflow CMS items automatically — no manual re-entry of the same product data across two systems.
Webflow API quirks, solved
Multi-reference CMS fields only accept plain JSON arrays of string IDs via the Webflow v2 API HTTP PATCH — not objects — which took real trial and error to land, plus extensive switch() formula work in Make to correctly map option field IDs.
Media handling
Uploadcare is integrated for device images, keeping upload and delivery decoupled from the core Webflow/Supabase data flow rather than bottlenecking image handling through either system directly.
Notifications & reviews
A manufacturer notification email system and automated review-submission handling run on Make, so key events on the platform trigger the right message without manual monitoring.
07 - Memberships
Supabase tracks activity against every manufacturer and clinic profile, feeding dashboards that show how a listing is actually performing rather than leaving members to post a profile and hope. That visibility is what makes the tiered pricing defensible — members can see the return on being listed, not just take it on trust.
08 - Search system
The two systems are built to do different jobs in sequence, mirroring how someone actually decides. Search — by limb type, activity level, funding stream — narrows a huge catalogue down to a realistic shortlist. Reviews then validate that shortlist with honest, wearer-only feedback and rating aggregation, deliberately kept free of manufacturer influence so the trust the whole platform depends on doesn't get quietly compromised by whoever pays for the highest tier.
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