Who
I kept meeting people who wanted Amazon Merch, Etsy POD, and Shopify print-on-demand to pay rent, and who were buying theory courses from people who had not shipped a design in years.
MerchWinner is for aspiring merch sellers who want practitioners. It is for active sellers who will teach if the split and the platform are not a second job. It is for operators who want to see a full Clerk + Convex + Stripe course-marketplace shape on Next.js 16 without pretending the catalog is full.
If you have ever built the checkout before the first SKU, this is for you.
What
I shipped MerchWinner.com: a user-contributed course marketplace for learning how to sell merch online. Public surfaces: home, /courses with search/category/sort, course detail + lesson player, /instructors, /about. Instructor workspace for create/edit/publish, lesson reorder, earnings, analytics, profile. Student enrollment dashboard. Money path on Stripe: one-time course and bundle checkout, Pro/Unlimited memberships, webhook to Convex purchases/subscriptions, Resend mail for enrollment, invoice, renewal, review reminders.
Stack from the lockfile, not the stale README line: Next.js ^16.2.6, React ^19.2.6, Convex ^1.38.0, Clerk, Stripe ^22.1.1, Resend, PostHog, Sentry, Tailwind v4, Radix, Catppuccin Mocha default. Package 0.1.0, private under HurleyUS. 86 commits. HEAD 65c4413.
Billing facts in lib/billing.ts: PLATFORM_FEE_PERCENT = 20 (creator net 80%). Plans: Pro $29/mo / $278/yr (3 courses/month) and Unlimited $49/mo / $470/yr. Homepage marketing still says "Earn 70% of every course sale." I would rather name the mismatch than paper it over.
Convex schema covers users (student/instructor/admin), instructorProfiles, courses, lessons, enrollments with progress, subscriptions, coursePurchases, bundlePurchases, payoutRequests, reviews. Eighteen App Router pages. Fourteen API routes. Bun + Biome + ship script.
Where
Code lives at github.com/HurleyUS/merchwinner.com (private). Live site: www.merchwinner.com. Vercel project URL on the repo homepage field: merchwinner-com.vercel.app. Apex redirects to www.
Audience sits next to every POD Discord still arguing Redbubble vs Merch while nobody ships curriculum. Contact in README: michael@hustlelaunch.com. Same operator family as the other HurleyUS Next/Convex products.
When
2026-01-08. 91c1e8e Initial commit: Next.js, Convex, Tailwind. Same day: opportunities doc and homepage pass.
February. Next 16 + React 19. Catppuccin dark mode, layout variants, stub /courses and /about. Feb 21 standards mega-fix closes a pile of issues. middleware, providers, schema, icons, fonts, email docs.
March 20–22. Stripe checkout patterns, instructor profile and earnings, webhook typing. Money enters the building.
March 25. Fourteen commits. Resend templates. Phase 2 webhook to email. Phase 3a–3c: instructor course creation, lesson manage UI, student enrollment and lesson player.
March 26. Nineteen commits. Phase 4 search/filters/SEO/schema markup. Phase 5 reviews UI + reminders. Phase 6a/6b earnings and analytics merges. Production-ready checklist docs.
March 27. Catppuccin unify across the site. Instructor and enrollment CTAs.
May 13–15. shipprep standards and a Blacksmith CI/deploy verification flurry.
2026-08-08, 06:55 ET. 65c4413 set X-Robots-Tag to index, follow on Vercel. HEAD. Eighty-six commits total.
On September 8, 2026 the live /courses page still reads "No courses available yet." The marketplace shipped. The catalog did not.
Why
I did not want another "courses coming soon" landing page with a Mailchimp box. I wanted the boring spine: auth roles, course/lesson tables, Stripe sessions, webhooks that enroll, email that confirms, instructor earnings that know the fee, student progress that is not a Google Sheet.
So I compressed the spine across six phases and left the honesty visible: empty catalog, empty instructors grid, README still claiming Next 15.5.6 and Payments N/A while Stripe and Next 16 are in the lockfile. Version 0.1.0. Private on purpose until the first real courses earn the public launch.
What would you publish first on MerchWinner: Amazon Merch niche research, Etsy POD ops, or TikTok ads that actually sell shirts?