Wellspent

Context

Wellspent began with a difficult product question: how can technology help people build a healthier relationship with technology itself? The company developed that question from research into a subscription-based digital wellbeing platform spanning iOS and backend services. As co-founder and CTO, my responsibility covered both the technical foundations and the product and data decisions that shaped them. The work mattered because an intervention intended to support user agency could not credibly depend on opaque or extractive engineering practices.

Challenge

The product operated near the boundaries of what Apple's platforms allowed. A multi-extension iOS ecosystem had to coordinate under tight memory constraints, while subscriptions, dynamic content, experimentation, and behavioral data collection needed to feel like one coherent product. Platform policy and the post-IDFA attribution landscape kept changing around us. The central tradeoff was therefore not simply speed against quality; it was how to learn enough to improve the product while collecting no more data than the work could justify.

Contribution

My contribution moved between implementation, architecture, and company-level technical stewardship. I shaped the iOS system around SwiftUI, The Composable Architecture, and GRDB, built backend services in TypeScript and Python, and introduced privacy-first analytics, GDPR practices, subscription infrastructure, marketing attribution, and experimentation capabilities. The architectural choices were paired with product and growth discussions, responsible-data decisions, and mentoring for junior ML researchers exploring behavioral patterns and hypotheses. Keeping those concerns connected was important: measurement, monetization, and product behavior could not be treated as independent systems.

Lasting Influence

Wellspent changed my understanding of architecture from a description of software into a way of preserving intent. A sound system made constraints visible, left room for platform change, and helped a small organization make responsible decisions without turning every decision into a rewrite. That perspective now informs my consulting practice: technical strategy is most useful when it connects implementation detail to product purpose, organizational capacity, and the trust a system asks of the people who use it.