Cardbox (2019) - Product Design & Development

In April 2019 I launched my first startup: Cardbox.

The app was a hybrid between a modern contacts app and a social network. It solely focused on keeping people digitally connected without noisy news feeds or posts.

Instead of having to keep all the contact information of everyone you know up-to-date yourself, Cardbox flipped the paradigm and put you in charge of only your own card. By ‘connecting’ to others, you would easily exchange cards and subscribe to each other’s contact information.

If someone updated their phone number, email address, social media handles, or even their photo, the changes would be instantly pushed to the device address books of all the people they connected with. This meant contact cards were read-only, always up-to-date, and backed up in the cloud.

The app included a global search field that made it easy to find Cardbox users to connect with, Nearby allowed you to quickly send connection requests to people in the vicinity using Bluetooth, Permissions let you choose what information to share on a per-person or per-group basis, and an optional subscription unlocked extra features.

Unfortunately keeping the service running wasn’t economical, and I shut the app down on July 1st, 2020.

I’m extremely proud of this project as I did everything myself, including product/icon/UI/UX design, branding, web design & development, full-stack development, PR, and customer support.

I learned a ton since this was my first React Native project, and thus the first time implementing iOS features like Push Notifications, Universal Links, Quick Actions, Bluetooth, In-App Subscriptions, gestures, haptics, CardDAV accounts, configuration profiles and more.

Make sure to also check out the icon I made for Cardbox!