FitDance is a dance education company with a large instructor network across Brazil. Its WordPress system had become a performance ceiling and blocked the mobile products the business needed. Paulo Cardoso helped build the replacement in Node.js and GraphQL, moved functionality in risk order, automated referral payment splits, and opened Mexico through dLocal and OXXO.
The system supported the business at first, then became a performance bottleneck. Its architecture also made the mobile products FitDance needed effectively impossible to build.
The company operated across every Brazilian state with a large instructor network. Subscriptions and payments were core to that network, so replacing the platform in one jump would have put the business at unnecessary risk.
The new stack was built from scratch in Node.js with GraphQL. Functionality moved out of WordPress gradually, ordered by risk.
The blog and posts moved first so the team could rehearse the switch where a failure would cost little. Only after that pattern held did subscriptions and payments move. Each stage became a small cutover instead of one large launch event.
Paulo did not design this page. His work was the platform behind it: the Node.js and GraphQL backend that replaced WordPress, the subscription and payment flows, and the Mexico integration through dLocal and OXXO.
2,000+ instructors · Brazil and MexicoThe cutover was designed as a sequence, not an event. Moving low-criticality content first gave the team a real rehearsal before subscriptions and payments moved, so every step tested the seam without staking the whole business on one night.
The rebuilt platform supported FitDance across Brazil and its first international market in Mexico.
Automated splitting handled the referral economics end to end through Pagar.me. The Mexico integration matched how customers there paid, including OXXO cash vouchers through dLocal, without forcing the Brazilian payment model onto a different market.
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