Couplr / Firstlook
Overview
Social media platform for singles. Owned mobile end-to-end as it scaled past 50K downloads. Started life as Firstlook and got revamped into Couplr.
Joined Mcabee as the second mobile engineer and grew into the lead role. Took ownership of Firstlook from a four-month-old codebase, and through the rebrand to Couplr I owned mobile architecture and shipping end-to-end.
The work spanned product, architecture, and the unglamorous parts: payments, Cloudflare streaming, sockets, identity verification, and ML-driven recommendations. With limited resources but a strong vision, I built and scaled features like feed, chat, stories, posts, proposals, and subscriptions, while mentoring juniors and shaping product direction with the founder.
Beyond features, I handled production fires, optimised performance, ran releases on both stores, set up the team's workflow tooling, and contributed to hiring and company strategy.
Key contributions
- 01Led mobile development for Firstlook → Couplr from second engineer through team lead
- 02Shipped feed, chat, stories, posts, proposals, subscriptions, and identity verification
- 03Integrated payments, Cloudflare streaming, sockets, and Firebase backend services
- 04Collaborated on ML-driven recommendation systems
- 05Owned releases and store deployments on both Play Store and App Store
- 06Mentored juniors, ran code reviews, kept coding standards high
- 07Set up GitHub, Notion, ClickUp, Slack as the team workflow stack
- 08Reached 50K+ downloads on Play Store
Gallery
