Building community at scale.
FaithSocial was a social media platform designed to help Christians worldwide connect, share, and grow in their faith. The vision was ambitious: a full-featured social network with live streaming, multimedia content, and community features—available on web, iOS, and Android.
I joined in 2018 as a bridge between the technical team and executive leadership. The business side had vision and drive; the engineering side had capability. What was missing was someone who could translate between worlds—helping leadership understand what technology could achieve, and helping engineering understand what the business actually needed.
That role evolved. By 2020, I stepped into the CTO position, responsible for the entire technical organization.
Bridging the gap between executive vision and technical execution. Helping leadership understand what's possible, and when to leverage technology for maximum impact.
Managing and growing a 30+ person engineering team across multiple disciplines—backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, QA.
Translating product vision into technical architecture. Turning roadmap priorities into implementation plans the team could execute.
Ensuring the platform could handle growth while keeping infrastructure costs sustainable. Finding the balance between performance and spend.
Social platforms are expensive to run. Databases grow exponentially. Media storage compounds. Real-time features demand always-on infrastructure. As we scaled toward 100K users, our server and database costs were threatening to outpace our runway.
The technical challenge wasn't just "make it work"—it was "make it work sustainably." We needed to support growth without letting infrastructure costs kill the business.
Through strategic vendor partnerships, database optimization, and infrastructure right-sizing, we cut operational costs by 50%—extending runway while continuing to scale. The platform grew from zero to over 100,000 users, with a full-featured social experience across web and mobile.
FaithSocial shut down in December 2022 when post-COVID market conditions made continued funding untenable. That's the reality of startups—not every venture survives, regardless of technical execution.
What we built worked. The platform scaled. The team delivered. When the decision came to sunset, we helped navigate that transition too.
Four years embedded with the team. Zero to 100K users. 30+ engineers. Build, scale, and—when necessary—wind down. The full lifecycle.