Independent builds

Why this page exists

A portfolio of team achievements has an obvious hole in it: how much of that could you actually do yourself? This is the answer, and it’s deliberately the shortest page here.

Effect House

Top 1% of creators, 18.5M+ views

I published AR effects on TikTok’s Effect House platform and ended up in the top 1% of its creators, with more than 18.5 million views across the work.

The reach mattered less than the feedback loop. Effect House is one of the few places where you can ship an idea to a real audience in an afternoon and get a clear signal back the same week. It’s a very different discipline from enterprise product work, and doing both makes you better at judging which ideas actually need six months.

Tech Visions NYC

A community I founded and ran to 3,000+ members

I started Tech Visions NYC to get the people building with emerging technology in the same room on a regular basis, and grew it past 3,000 members, with speakers from Google, Accenture, Snap and 8th Wall alongside new creators who had little presentation experience. Many of them now present regularly.

Running it for several years was the closest thing I’ve had to a standing user-research practice: a recurring audience of practitioners telling me, without being asked, what was actually working and what was hype.

Prototypes

Not everything shipped, and the misses belong here too. ABC Space was a location-anchored AR language game for early readers: letters and animals anchored to real places, so a kid could learn on a walk around the neighbourhood. I designed and prototyped it; it never shipped. I also built ‘Hide the Hubu’, one of the earlier ARKit games, and a VR music experience for the band Grandaddy.

ABC Space died on the thing that made it interesting: anchoring to real places instead of printed markers. Markers are reliable and easy to demo; real-world anchoring depends on lighting and GPS drift and fails in ways you can’t reproduce indoors. I took the fragile version because the walk was the product, and I never got it stable enough to put in front of a child who would rightly lose patience with it. It's an idea that is still compelling, so hopefully when the tech can support it, the concept will find a home.