I co-founded and built a mobile-first options flow platform for retail traders. Native iOS, real-time backend, zero paid acquisition. Acquired in 2023.
During the 2020–2021 retail trading boom, the tools traders needed — real-time options flow showing what institutional money was doing — were expensive, desktop-only, and built for professionals. Retail traders were making decisions on the go, from their phones, during market hours.
Nobody owned mobile options flow.
The winning product would compress institutional-grade options activity into a mobile workflow fast enough to use during market hours. Data had to be real-time, the UI had to reduce decision time to seconds, and alerts had to turn passive monitoring into active workflows.
I built exclusively for iOS when everyone said go web. The web space was crowded. Mobile was unowned territory. TitanFlow didn't compete — it became the category.
TitanFlow shipped as a native iOS app with a backend built around real-time market data ingestion, options flow processing, and subscription management.
The core experience: a real-time, filterable options flow feed
The primary surface was a live feed updating in real-time. Every entry showed ticker, expiration, strike, premium size, volume, call/put, sweep/block classification, and unusual activity flags. Users could filter by aggression level, expiration type, and contract characteristics.
The goal was straightforward: open the app and within seconds understand what institutional money was doing.
Trending contracts turned raw flow into a discovery layer — surfacing contracts with concentrated activity so traders didn't have to scan every order. The daily snapshot gave a quick market-wide read before open. Alerts were the retention loop — users set conditions and got push notifications while away.
Dark pool prints — large institutional orders executed off-exchange — were one of the most requested features. We built a dedicated service to ingest, process, and surface them alongside regular flow.
I wrote approximately 80% of the iOS frontend in Swift, solo, without AI-assisted tools. First version live on the App Store in under 90 days. Everything built in-house — no third-party services for core functionality.
The retail trading community lived on Discord and Reddit. Credibility in those spaces drove organic, high-intent growth. We seeded the beta through trading servers and subreddits. The positioning — democratizing institutional data for regular people — resonated.
I brokered partnerships with five trading groups and fintech-adjacent tools for cross-promotion and revenue sharing. Beta launched with over 1,000 signups by the next morning. First week after App Store launch: 50 paying customers.
Community-driven growth through Discord and Reddit trading groups
The more actively someone traded, the more valuable real-time alerts, trend detection, and dark pool data became. Pricing mapped directly to that.
A private mid-sized trading firm approached us. They wanted the visualization libraries and UI — the way the data was designed and displayed. Rather than build their own, they bought ours. Acquired at approximately 10x monthly revenue.
Android users switched to iPhone to use TitanFlow. That doesn't come from a feature set. It comes from people feeling like a product was built for them.
Full lifecycle ownership — discovery, definition, engineering, GTM, partnerships, growth. Team of 12.
~80% of the iOS frontend in Swift. Designed the distributed backend. Wired the real-time data pipeline end-to-end.
Identified a platform-market fit shift. Committed to iOS-only when consensus said web. Turned that constraint into a moat.
First commit to App Store in 90 days. Launch to acquisition in three years. No playbook. No prior product to inherit.