Mark Bao Consulting
Specializing in designing and developing B2B/B2C apps
Atom, a financial data and news platform ›
In addition to design and development, I think about how a product can most effectively deliver value to the user, increasing engagement, and creating user behavior loops.
I specialize in developing new products for the marketplace as well as MVPs (minimum viable products) to test out ideas. Based on my unique background in product design, engineering, and behavioral science, my process for doing so is:
To create engaging, mobile-optimized apps, I primarily work with the modern JavaScript ecosystem (React, Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL), but I’m also flexible and can work with Ruby on Rails or Python stacks as well. I’m also able to develop native mobile apps on React Native, and can work with consulting partners for Swift-based mobile apps.
If you have an app you’d like to build, then let’s talk about if it would be mutually beneficial to work together. Schedule 20 minutes on the phone with me so I can understand the product, what the value-add would be, and why you’re excited about it. I’ll let you know if I can help and design a plan for making it a reality.
Unlike other consultants, I combine a high-level focus on the value-add of a product, with a background in behavioral science, with the ability to design, develop, and deliver a fully functional product.
Atom
Financial data and news platform
Design and development of full product, data ingestion and management, real-time chat
Atom is a source of financial data and news for investors. It provides real-time equity price data, a place to track stocks you’re interested in, and detailed historical financial data. To help investors find promising equities, Atom provides a screener for finding new stocks based on 20 financial indicators. Finally, it allows groups of investors like investing clubs to collaborate with a group chat system.
I designed the product to feel forward-thinking and innovative, differentiating it from current financial data tools, using a periodic table-like ‘stock tile’ format to represent companies, which gives the user a quick way to view the performance of a stock.
- Designed and developed a responsive, single-page application (SPA) frontend with real-time stock price updates, using React and GraphQL
- Developed a backend and API with user accounts, and stock tracking, with Node.js, TypeScript, and PostgreSQL
- Implemented a system to ingest data for tens of thousands of ticker symbols and hundreds of thousands of financial reports into a normalized format, and allowing users to search for companies by specifying criteria for 20 financial indicators
- Designed and developed a real-time group chat system with stock ticker auto-completion based on Apollo GraphQL
- Instrumented the app for analytics using Segment and Mixpanel
Kindred
Referral recruiting software
Design and development of full product and marketing pages, data ingestion and management, payment integration
Kindred is a recruiting tech product that helps companies hire from their existing employee networks. It allows employees to opt in to allow recruiters to search for candidates that existing employees are already connected to, automating a process that’s happening manually within companies today, or not at all.
- Designed and developed a single-page application (SPA) frontend, along with responsive marketing and pricing pages, using React and GraphQL
- Developed a backend and API with user accounts, permissions, employee inviting, and user management using Node.js, TypeScript, and GraphQL
- Optimized PostgreSQL database queries for finding matching candidates for a position
- Implemented a data processing queue to process user-given data
- Implemented payment integration to allow customers to subscribe to the application using Stripe