Founder + builder
Role
2 (consumer + business)
Marketplace sides
SXSW Launch 2013
Launch venue
Filed
Provisional patent
The Bet
Take local-deals discovery from offline to mobile-first geo + social.
Local deals lived in newspaper inserts, mailers, and the windows of the businesses themselves. Bliips was a two-sided marketplace built to move that to mobile-first discovery — geo-aware, social-aware, and with the back-office tools to let businesses run their own promotions. The bet: combine FB/Twitter auth, GPS, Google Maps, and an aggregation API for inventory the businesses didn't have to enter from scratch.
What I Shipped
Brand, web app, mobile spec, investor package, and the launch.
Designed the full brand identity — the "yellow smile" mark, wordmark, business cards, and social cards for FB / Twitter / LinkedIn. Designed and shipped the web app: home, search, results, login, signup, and the back-office admin. Authored the mobile app interaction spec (login flow, search, results card UI, GPS, FB/Twitter auth, in-app sharing). Authored the API and data-mining service architecture documents that defined how inventory got aggregated.
Produced the complete investor materials package: pitch deck, executive summary, comparable-acquisitions analysis, burn-rate model, revenue-potential model, angel investor letter. Filed a provisional patent. Ran PR around launch — including the SXSW Launch Festival 2013 coverage that put the product in front of its first wave of users.
Why It Matters For Lvl Up
I've sat on every side of a build.
Bliips is the founder-credibility piece. Lvl Up clients aren't just hiring an engineer or just hiring a strategist — they're hiring someone who has personally founded, designed, built, and pitched a product company. When we ship an Implementation Sprint we ship it with that whole-stack perspective: brand, product, architecture, story, launch.