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Octane Technologies

From zero to 100,000 users.

As a lifelong car enthusiast, I started Octane as a passion project while in college. With significant traction and backing from Techstars (Detroit, 2019), the founding team decided to pause school and pursue the project full-time. By late 2019, we had over 100,000 registered users, were in partnership talks with Ford and eBay Motors, and were raising our seed round. Unfortunately, by early 2020, the pandemic killed our partnership talks and fundraising. Despite our efforts to pivot, we ran out of runway and shuttered the service in mid 2020. Though the company failed, the founders walked away with experience and learnings that cannot be achieved any other way.

Consumer · GTM · Mobile · Founder

Notable accomplishments

  • Organically grew the user base to 100,000+ registered users with 40,000 monthly active users within 8 months of launch
  • Drove the entire app production cycle from ideation, development, deployment, to analytics
  • Accepted into iVenture Accelerator and Techstars Accelerator
  • #44 Trending Social Networking app on the App Store at its peak

Tools and systems

  • Invision

    Mobile UI/UX design and prototyping

  • Firebase

    Primary real-time database

  • Kotlin

    Cutting edge (at the time) cross platform mobile development framework