Three hundred million people had already joined. My job was to rebuild the app they joined for.
Tagged is a social-discovery network, a place to meet people you do not already know. I built the mobile team and led Tagged 2.0, the ground-up rebuild of the iPhone and Android apps for the iOS 7 and KitKat era. The version we shipped is, in its lineage, still live at tagged.com today.
Social discovery at scale.
Most social apps connect you to people you already know. Tagged did the opposite: it was built to help you meet strangers, through a swipe called Meet Me, a map called Explore, chat, and social games. By 2013 it had over 300 million registered members and 15 million monthly actives across 120 countries, an enormous, global, and genuinely diverse audience, monetized not by ads alone but by a virtual-goods economy people actually spent in.
A platform this big had to move like a startup again.
The audience was massive, but the mobile apps had to catch up to where phones had gone: iOS 7 had just flattened everything, Android KitKat was reshaping the other half of the world, and users now lived on their phones. I was hired to build the mobile product team and lead a ground-up rebuild. Not a reskin, a version 2.0: new design language, new architecture, rebuilt for the modern phone and fast enough to keep iterating.
Three signatures, one recognizable app.
Tagged 2.0 runs on three signatures: a quiet dark chrome that lets faces and photos lead, a hexagon frame around every profile photo, and a single raspberry-pink for every action worth taking. The home screen is a grid, your hexagon photo and gold balance over a cover, then tiles for the things you came to do: Profile, News Feed, Explore, Meet Me, Friends, Message, Pets, Alerts, Store. Everything one tap from home.
Yes, no, next.
Meet Me is Tagged's swipe: a face, a name, an age, a place, and two choices, yes or no. It is the fastest way the product had to turn a stranger into a match and a match into a conversation, a gesture that, across the whole category in these years, became the way people meet online. In v2.0 we made it fast, photo-forward, and native on both platforms.
A map full of people to meet.
Explore put discovery on a map: hexagon avatars pinned across your city, filters for age, distance, and place, and a ranked list of people nearby and recently active. Friends, requests, and real-time chat closed the loop, from seeing someone to saying something.
A social network with a working economy.
Tagged did not run on ads alone. It had a real virtual economy: Gold, the in-app currency, a Store of virtual goods, subscriptions for more reach and better discovery, and social games like Pets that kept people spending and coming back. Part of leading mobile product was making that economy feel native to the app, not bolted on, so monetization and delight pulled in the same direction.
Build the team, then build fast.
I built out the mobile product team and moved us to a Kanban way of working, so we could prototype, ship, and learn continuously instead of in big infrequent releases. We designed for iOS 7 and KitKat natively, and we prototyped for what was coming next, including glanceable, wearable-era interfaces, thinking about how discovery would feel in a glance, not just a screen.
Who gets to build the future.
The same summer we were prototyping for the glanceable, wearable era, Tagged opened its San Francisco offices to the Hidden Genius Project, a program that trains young Black men in software, design, and entrepreneurship. The students spent the day with the mobile team and tried on the Google Glass we were experimenting with. One thirteen-year-old, Isaiah Martin, asked a question that landed harder than any roadmap review.
“Ten years from now, if you’re still here, will you hook us up with a job?”
It made an abstract gap concrete. Black and Latino workers were well under a tenth of the tech workforce then, roughly one in fourteen tech employees across the Bay Area, in an industry that liked to call itself a meritocracy. Tagged, co-founded by Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith, made hosting groups like Hidden Genius, NewME, Black Girls Code, and Girls in Tech a standing commitment.
Most apps you build are gone in a few years. Tagged is not. The network we rebuilt in 2013 and 2014 is, in its direct lineage, still live at tagged.com more than a decade later, and the company was later acquired by The Meet Group. The version 2.0 we shipped became the foundation that outlasted almost everything else I have built.
My part.
I was Head of Mobile Product at Tagged, over iOS, Android, and mobile web. I built the mobile team, led the v2.0 rebuild end to end, from the design language and the Meet Me gesture to the discovery surfaces and the virtual economy, and set up the way the team shipped. Taking a 300-million-member network and making it feel new again, without breaking what people already loved, was the job.
The rare thing in this business is not shipping an app. It is shipping one that is still alive a decade later, still helping strangers become something more. Tagged 2.0 is that one.