Dey Play

Went from concept to an App Store-approved release using Claude Code as the primary development environment. Stack: React Native with Expo, Firebase Realtime Database for card pools, Gen 2 Cloud Functions on Node.js 24, and Paystack for local-currency payments.

Hit an App Store rejection on the initial submission over payment guideline compliance (Guideline 3.1.1) and restructured the payment approach to ship an approved v1.0.1.

Grew to 1,743 iOS downloads and #19 in the Cards category on the Nigerian App Store on approximately $360 in total marketing spend. Ran the entire paid and organic growth motion solo.

Cut cost per download 60%, from $0.31 to $0.12, by re-pricing a creator campaign and paid social to optimize for downloads instead of views, then reallocating budget from an 8-video TikTok creator run to owned Instagram paid social. Instrumented GA4, Meta Ads Manager, App Store Connect, and TikTok Studio to run the acquisition funnel end to end.

Diagnosed a UGC campaign's zero-submission problem as a broken 4-step entry flow rather than a lack of demand, using funnel data, then fixed it by collapsing the flow. Disproved a suspected retention leak using a saved cohort segment before the wrong health metric got retired.

Modeled the paywall placement decision from first principles, deriving a break-even CAC-to-price threshold and finding a 7x revenue gap between the shipped paywall gate and the correct one. Negotiated a 5-campus experiential sponsorship down from a published $220-per-campus rate to $145 while securing post-event reporting. Audited regional ad delivery data and caught a geo-targeting leak sending up to 65% of one campaign's reach outside Nigeria.