HeyBuddies

The Project

HeyBuddies (heybuddi.es) is a social platform that connects people through shared activities and local events. Unlike our consulting work, this is a product we built from scratch and continue to operate - giving us firsthand experience with the full lifecycle of running a live B2C platform.

What We Built

• Full-stack Symfony application with PostgreSQL, handling user profiles, activity matching, event management, and messaging
• Vue.js frontend with real-time features, location-based discovery, and mobile-first responsive design
• Payment integration with Stripe for premium features and event ticketing
• Operations infrastructure on AWS with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring

Why This Matters

Running our own product keeps us sharp in ways that consulting alone doesn’t:

• We deal with real users - not just stakeholders. We understand conversion funnels, retention, and the difference between features users say they want and features they actually use.
• We pay the infrastructure bills - so we genuinely care about cost optimization, not just theoretical best practices.
• We ship continuously - not quarterly releases, but daily iterations based on real usage data.

This hands-on product experience directly informs how we advise clients building their own platforms.