Mycons is another one of my personal solo projects, and is a PERFECT example of possibly my absolute favorite format/framework/product thesis to work and live by… Lean, rapid, hyper-focused MVP prototyping! Warp speed planning + design + building, all while doing one of the hardest things there is to do in the Product world… Constantly monitoring and maintaining the perfect balance between sacrifice and quality.

While prototyping for a Minimum Viable Product, it’s so insanely critical to constantly be making sacrifices and cuts, but always ensure that you’re making the RIGHT sacrifices and cuts. It’s difficult to do, but you need the perpetual discipline, focus and clarity to make sure you’re sacrificing QUANTITY and not QUALITY at every step. Cutting every feature and option that doesn’t absolutely NEED to be there, while ensuring that whatever ends up being built gets meticulous attention to detail and ends up feeling premium and polished.

The Mycons project was the perfect embodiment of this Product ideology and process. News broke that someone discovered a way to use iOS Shortcuts to customize Home Screen App Icons. The idea for a user friendly design tool + marketplace to make this easier was an instant “no brainer”. So I took Mycons from concept, to live in the App Store and featured on TechCrunch in 4 weeks.

Birch is one of my latest solo projects. It is a different kind of Notes App, one that is built for photos instead of text! Most people have adopted this new trend of quickly snapping a photos of random things they need to remember later. Receipts, household items, product labels, bills, whiteboards, etc. However, the stock photos app was not built for keeping photos like this orgnaized and Birch makes everything about these new types of “Photo Notes” much easier and way more organized.

Everything from concept ideation, feature planning, logo & branding, UX and interface design, as well as all development was done as a solo project. It was also featured by Apple in “Apps We Love Right Now” & is installed in 175 countries 🙂

Stormy was a fun little personal weekend hackathon, that quickly gained traction. Back when “Tweetstorms” became a thing, I wanted to challenge myself to see how quickly I could ideate a concept, brand it, and build it.

Stormy went from “what should I make?” to finished in about 48 hours, and got covered by TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. the day after it went live in the App Store. Personal challenges like this are super fun and rewarding for me, and a couple of the big Dev Shops here in Boston used it as an example and case study to educate their employees on rapid concept ideation and prototyping.

Cloaq was one of my first startups with my co-founder, Ramesh Kumar. It was a social platform, focused on privacy. It was one of my first apps from both a design and development standpoint, so it wasn’t as polished as I would like it to be for a portfolio item… But the mission and results were pretty special.

Within a few hours of launching our beta, we filled up all 10,000 beta user slots we opened. Throughout the 10 months of this closed beta, we maintained a remarkable 85% engagement from this random 1st come 1st serve batch. But the truly special thing was while other anonymous platforms were being used for trolls to spew hateful garbage… only 6 posts had to be moderated from over 500,000, and I still get flowers sent to me on the anniversary of our launch from some of our power users. This was due to the branding, messaging, and strategic use of some key functional/mechanical components of how the app worked.