Open-sourcing creatorstory

It’s been some time since creatorstory has been sunset.

I’ve learned immensely from the wonderful journey that happens in the creation and ending of a new product (wrote a few words about it on This is NOT a startup post-mortem). The biggest learning, however, was more personal: I’ve learned that I could be resourceful beyond what my skills limit me.

So, in the hope that the code might come useful to a resourceful one out there, someone growing a community and on the lookout for a product that helps them curate crowdsourced member-contributions, I’m open-sourcing the product.

You can find it on GitHub: creatorstory open-source

The product can be specially interesting if videos are important for the interest group. There is also a forum in the product, so topical discussions can be facilitated. User management, browser notifications, transactional email notifications & integration with Mailchimp for campaigns and newsletters are also implemented.

The application is a heavily customized Telescope (MeteorJS) app that was used by members of the creatorstory community to curate videos posted by other members of the community and to discuss in a forum-like space.

The tech-stack is:

• Telescope
• MeteorJS
• MongoDB
• Compose.io
• Cloudinary
• Embedly
• Azure
• Mailchimp
• Mailgun

This comes with a disclaimer, though: the creatorstory project is unmaintained and MeteorJS has moved on substantially since I've had creatorstory in production.