Project Beta
A social commerce platform that bridges the gap between digital creators and physical brands.
Overview
Project Beta is a social commerce platform connecting digital creators with physical product brands. Creators curate storefronts, share products with their audience, and earn commission on every sale — all within a native mobile experience.
Role
Technical Lead responsible for architecture decisions, code quality, and mentoring a team of 4 mobile engineers. Worked closely with the product designer and growth PM to balance technical debt against feature velocity.
Goals
Achieve a 60-second storefront creation flow. Reach 10,000 creator signups within 3 months of launch. Maintain sub-200ms API response times under peak load of 50k concurrent users.
Constraints
Cross-platform requirement (iOS + Android) with a team experienced primarily in iOS. Payment processing had to support 12 countries with different tax regulations. Tight seed-stage runway meant shipping an MVP in 10 weeks.
Process
Adopted React Native to address the cross-platform constraint with a single codebase. Ran 2-week sprints with a strict "demo Friday" cadence. Built a feature flag system early to enable gradual rollouts and A/B testing from day one.
Key Decisions
Selected Stripe Connect for multi-party payments, avoiding months of custom payment infrastructure. Chose an offline-first architecture so creators in regions with spotty connectivity could still manage their storefronts. Invested in automated E2E tests early, which caught 23 critical regressions before they reached users.
Results
Storefront creation averaged 47 seconds. Hit 14,200 creator signups in the first 3 months (42% above target). API p95 latency held at 165ms under peak load. The app maintained a 4.7-star rating across both app stores.