Outin icon: a white location pin with a lightning bolt on a magenta-to-violet tile.Outin icon: a white location pin with a lightning bolt on a magenta-to-violet tile.
2021 · Product

Outin

An app for meeting the people going to the same concert or festival as you, and a showcase for promoters to reach their audience. I co-founded it with two partners and was its CTO.

Role
Co-founder and CTO
Launched
Stack
  • Swift
  • iOS
  • Android

The challenge

Meeting new people is hard. The first interaction is difficult, and shyness and the fear of rejection weigh heavily, especially at a concert or a festival, where you are surrounded by people with the same tastes as you and hardly talk to anyone. On the other side, event promoters had no reference platform to advertise on and no easy way to build a community around their audience.

Outin brought the two together. You joined an event, looked up its details and discovered the other attendees. If there was mutual interest, you both went to the event knowing it: the first interaction was easier and you didn’t have to arrange to meet on purpose. Promoters, for their part, had a showcase in front of people who consume live music and a way to strengthen the sense of community.

What I did

Outin was started from scratch with two partners and I took on the role of CTO. I led the whole technical strategy of the product:

  • iOS app. I designed and built it in Swift, from the idea through to its release and evolution.
  • Platform. I coordinated the development of the Android app and the web, both frontend and backend, and looked after the architecture and maintenance of the whole platform.
  • Business. I took part in defining the product, the growth strategy and the search for funding, and worked with design, marketing and potential investors.

The result

We launched the app on iOS and Android, together with a landing page, on 28 October 2021, the day BIME opened in Bilbao, where we had been selected from 16 projects for its BIMEPRO programme.

Between November 2021 and May 2022, Outin passed 2,500 users, with an average of 15 new sign-ups a day, more than 2,100 “flashes” (the gesture you used to show interest in someone) and more than 500 chats opened. We closed 11 partnerships with events and added 26 events successfully. In 2022 we took part in the Barcelona Activa Bootcamp and, in 2023, we had our own stand at 4YFN at Mobile World Congress, on my tenth MWC.

It was an intense stage in which I learned about digital product, technical leadership and what it really means to start a business from scratch.