Role focus
Built a bootstrapped product platform from the ground up.
I co-founded and built the platform for GoGive, a product for businesses to give charitable donations as gifts to employees, customers, and prospects.
Scope
As CTO/co-founder, I owned product and technical decisions across frontend, backend, local development, Kubernetes delivery, and onboarding workflows.
What I built
I developed frontend and backend applications, implemented Nix/direnv tooling for fast onboarding on Mac and Linux, and implemented Tilt for local development.
What I learned
Solo and small-team product development is different from operating inside a larger engineering organization. Every product, architecture, and tooling decision had to balance speed, maintainability, and bootstrapped constraints.
Why it mattered
The platform work made it possible to keep moving quickly without letting local development and deployment become a constant drag on product work.