estu
A student neobank: real banking for college students, with events, deals and social built into the same app. I led the mobile build and owned the hardest systems.
- role
- lead mobile engineer
- when
- 2022 to 2023, maintained for years after
- built with
- react native, redux, next.js, node, python, postgresql, mongodb, aws
- ~5,000users
- 4.8★both stores
- 65%monthly retention
- 99.5%crash-free sessions
what it was
an all-in-one product for college students. real bank accounts and cards on one side, events, exclusive deals, brand collaborations and social features on the other. the founder was a college student himself, building for the room he was sitting in.
what i owned
- auth and kyc onboarding, document verification end to end
- banking integration: accounts, cards, ach, wire, p2p, statements
- real-time chat
- push notifications across both platforms
- the admin panel the team ran the product from
the hard part
regulated banking does not forgive a sloppy client. card issuing through mbanq, identity verification with document upload, apple wallet and google wallet provisioning, every state a transfer can fail in. the app had to stay calm through all of it, on a student's three year old android phone.
honest framing
i led this build on a team and wrote the majority of the app. i did not build it alone, and the parts i did not own were owned well by other people.
status
not live. the company wound down because distribution was never solved, not because the product broke. that is the reason i think about launch now and not just shipping.