FeatherSnap
A social bird-watching platform for smart-camera owners. Taken from MVP to roughly 50,000 monthly active users, first as senior engineer, then as lead.
- Role
- Senior engineer → Lead developer
- Timeline
- MVP in 9 months
- Client
- Tactacam
- Platform
- iOS, Android, Web
Outcome
The product
FeatherSnap turns a smart bird camera into a social platform: owners get a feed of captures, automatic bird identification, and a way to share and follow. It spans iOS, Android, and web from a shared codebase.
My role
I joined as a senior engineer before launch and moved into the lead developer seat after it. Pre-launch I owned large parts of the frontend and the data contracts between app and backend; post-launch I led the work that scaled it.
Scaling it
The MVP launched in nine months and grew to roughly 50,000 monthly active users within two years. The build ran on AWS CDK-provisioned serverless infrastructure so it could scale with the user base.
Key features
- Social media feed
- Automatic bird identification
- Authentication
- Push notifications
- In-app e-commerce store
Technical detail Stack, integrations, and the harder problems.
- Built the social-feed frontend plus the data contracts and end-to-end tests for the platform in under two months.
- Shipped an in-app e-commerce store using an authenticated web view disguised as a native screen, so purchases felt native without a separate native build.
- Serverless backend on AWS CDK (API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB) provisioned as code and built to scale with the user base.
Mobile apps (React Native / Expo)
iOS and Android from one codebase, through app-store review and into users' hands, then scaled. That is the shape of this project.
Want a result like this?
Tell me what you're building or what's in the way. I read every message and reply within one business day.