Co-founder and Full Stack developer in Quackmate

Quackmate was born as a tool to manage your social networks and automatize small business and entrepreneurs social media posts. In this new work I shifted from a backend engineering role to a full stack developer role, focusing on the social media creation part of it.

Development

While managing the social media for Vooyai, I realized a big portion of the work could be automatized, and after sharing my thoughts with my colleague we decided to set Vooyai aside and start developing Quackmate, as we thought there was a bigger market for this kind of tool, even if there was more competition. This was my first experience with frontend development (experience I also used to improve some components from Vooyai). In this new project, the stack we used was slightly different to Vooyai's. Initially the idea was to follow a similar approach, but with an scalable backend in AWS, improving from previous knowledge while developing Vooyai, but after setting it up we realized it would be more cost-effective to set up the backend using serverless functions, so we could host everything using Vercel platform.

After completing our Minimum Viable Product (MVP), my co-founder and I carefully reviewed the feedback from our initial test users and analyzed the product's performance metrics. During this process, it became clear that we had different visions for the project's future direction, where my co-founder asked me for a buy me out, enabling him to continue developing the project according to his plan. We reached a mutual agreement, and I left the project. This decision gave me the opportunity to focus on finishing my PhD and explore new ideas that I had been postponing, and it also taught me important lessons about working with a partner in a startup. I learned how vesting schedules can prevent ownership issues and how shotgun clauses can ensure fair recognition of your contributions. These experiences have given me a deeper understanding of startup dynamics and I believe they have prepared me well for future ventures.