An amazing engineering surprise
The tale of a seemingly normal Zoom call that turned into a "sixth sense" plot twist
I almost fell out of my chair today from what has to go down as one of the most incredible engineering team reveals of all time...
A bit of background: our team has been working on a beta version of Parsnip for iOS for several months. Initial feedback from users has been promising, and we're preparing to go live in the App Store.
So, our partners at TapForce call a meeting to show us a new "feature" in the app, which at first looks pretty much the same as what we've been playing with.
Except... something's wrong.
The fonts look a bit off.
The borders are a bit thicker than before.
Our logo's a little smaller.
There's a different spinner on the loading screens.
The UI elements are animating in a strange way...
I'm starting to get a little worried. TapForce is an elite team with incredibly high standards for their work, and the thing on my screen feels like a novice engineer decided to go choose-your-own-adventure with our Figma.
Then, the "Sixth Sense" reveal walloped me in the face.
I wasn't looking at an iOS app at all!
Tapforce, from the ground up, had secretly built an Android version of Parsnip, just about hitting feature parity with our iOS version, even as we were iterating quickly and preparing for a public release.
And in case you’re wondering: no, this wasn’t a React Native deployment of an existing iOS app—we had started with native iOS for speed and user experience. No, this was a full-blown native Android app, hence the visual differences, which makes it all the more astounding.
We didn't ask for this. We didn't even think we had the resources to pursue it! But folks were clearly excited about Parsnip, and hundreds of users who didn't have iOS were clamoring to try it on Android.
Now, we can open our doors to them.
I'm so grateful to be working with the talented and passionate team at TapForce. At some level deep in my heart, I know that any company would need an incredible mission and culture to truly empower their engineers to blow expectations out of the water1 like this. We might not be fully there yet, but I'm glad to see we're on the way.
An even bigger shout-out as Tapforce pulled this off in the middle of a war. I'm humbled to be on this journey with them. 🙏
In a future memo, I’ll share more about how working with the right offshore engineering team can be a superpower rather than a liability for a startup.
If you're looking for a mobile/web development partner that will blow your mind on a regular basis, TapForce is always looking for exceptional startups to partner with for the long term.
Just like their countrymen blowing the Moskva out of the water… 🚀🚢
Agree on the MVP-first approach. Worth noting that the 'build it yourself' path works until it doesn't — usually around the time you need to scale or add complex features. Having a dedicated developer on the product (not a freelancer juggling 5 clients) makes a real difference. Happy to share more — we help startups with this at witarist.com.
Good points here. The bottleneck I see most often with early-stage teams isn't the idea — it's engineering velocity. When founders are context-switching between product decisions and writing code, things slow down fast. Dedicated dev capacity is usually the unlock. We do exactly this at witarist.com if anyone's looking.