PersonaFi
A social trading platform for retail investors. Co-founded in Hawaii in 2020, scaled to 80,000 users, wound down in 2022.
Investing as a community, not a solo activity.
PersonaFi was built on a simple thesis: most retail investors trade alone, learn slowly, and follow anonymous voices on Reddit and Twitter. We wanted to put a real community inside the app — where users could follow each other's portfolios, subscribe to traders they trusted, and post real trades alongside analysis.
By the time the platform was wound down in mid-2022, it had grown into a community of 80,000 users with a peak monthly active around 48,000, a creator marketplace where top traders monetized paid trade alerts, and brokerage integrations that let users link real portfolios from Robinhood, Coinbase, and others.
Founding engineer for iOS, from v0 to v2.4.
I co-founded PersonaFi and led iOS engineering from before the first commit through nine versioned releases. As founding engineer I owned the architecture of the app and shipped most of the customer-facing features in the screenshots below, working closely with our design team to translate Figma into a cohesive iOS experience and making the early architectural decisions that had to support feature growth across an unknown future roadmap.
- Real-time market data for charts and alerts
- Plaid brokerage linking + manual trades
- Multi-asset portfolio (stocks, crypto, options)
- Social feed with hashtags, comments, follows
- Creator subscription marketplace
- Trade alert subscriptions & paywall
- Push notification infrastructure
- User profiles with rank & performance
- Onboarding & activation flows
A look inside.
A small selection of screens from v2.x of the app.
Reach and shipping cadence.
Across 16 months of active iOS development from v0.1 to v2.4: 1,675 commits, 529 pull requests merged, 388 Swift source files, peak MAU around 48,000.
Swift, UIKit, Combine, custom charting, REST & WebSocket data feeds, Plaid SDK, StoreKit subscriptions, push notifications, AWS Amplify and Firebase on the backend.
The team wound down PersonaFi in mid-2022. The codebase remains the work I refer back to most often — most of the architectural patterns I rely on now traced their first iteration to this app.