Truity sells personality tests that millions of people have taken; the growth obstacle was customers purchasing once. We delivered a subscription mobile app, with daily mood tracking, personality surveys, progressively unlocked insights, in under 12 weeks on a fixed price, then carried it through years of ongoing development, including a full backend migration.
The Situation
Truity, a California company that made the INC 5000 fastest-growing list three years running, had a large website funnel and customers who nearly all purchased once. A mobile app was the play to convert that funnel into a subscription product and raise customer LTV. The constraints were the real brief: fast, at bounded cost, and without distracting the core business that was funding the bet.
What We Did
Fixed-price MVP first: a working React Native cross-platform app delivered in under 12 weeks within a deliberately small fixed budget. What that version deliberately didn’t have: a backend the team would enjoy operating. We ran it on Firebase managed through Retool: workable, not pleasant, and chosen because operability wasn’t the question the MVP existed to answer. Then the engagement moved to ongoing development under a monthly budget cap, working closely with the CEO and the in-house CTO and product designer who led product direction. When operability did become the question, we migrated the backend from Firebase + Retool to Directus on Node and PostgreSQL, giving the team a structured, responsive content-management interface. We kept iterating: push notifications, convenient authentication, a GenAI chatbot integration, and codebase updates as the platform aged. QA was part of the team throughout, so sustained change didn’t erode quality.
What Moved
The MVP shipped in under 12 weeks on its fixed budget: the side bet validated at strictly bounded cost, which was the metric the engagement was designed around. The app is live on Google Play and has been iterated continuously since; that is a fact of record, not a performance metric. The Directus migration gave Truity’s team a content interface they could actually run the product with, a qualitative outcome, as the team reported it. What we don’t publish: subscription-revenue figures. That instrumentation belongs to the client, and we don’t claim numbers we didn’t measure.
Where It Went
The engagement grew from a small fixed-price MVP to multi-year ongoing development with the same team. That progression, from bounded experiment to sustained product work, is the pattern we now design engagements around: price the experiment like an experiment, and only scale the spend once the business question has an answer.