Collect
Co-founded and led product for a minimalist platform that helps people organize and share curated photo collections through an intuitive interface.
Collect is a social platform I co-founded to help people curate and share visual experiences through a minimalist UI. I owned the Unity prototype and React front end, the Firebase/Firestore data model, and onboarding experiments that supported healthy early retention through the private beta.
Product Highlights Permalink
- Guided capture flow that tags each upload with collection type, mood, and location metadata using lightweight ML and heuristics.
- Collaborative boards so friends can co-curate travel mood boards or inspiration decks in real time.
- Shareable public profiles with privacy presets that made it easy to show a subset of collections during portfolio reviews.
My Role Permalink
- Designed the UX system, built the Unity-based prototype, and later ported the experience to React for faster iteration.
- Implemented photo ingestion, collection sorting, and offline-first caching in Firebase/Firestore.
- Led qualitative research sessions with photographers and designers to shape the roadmap and validate pricing experiments.
Outcomes Permalink
- Built an invite-only beta community and referral loop that drove steady organic growth without paid spend.
- Shared the beta with maker communities (including Product Hunt) to gather structured qualitative feedback.
- Captured product and onboarding insights that later informed my work on avatar galleries in Microsoft Mesh.
