Independent Product
A private, invite-only feed for sharing cat photos and videos with family, with games built in.
Every family with a cat has the same problem: where do all the photos go? Daily Meow solves it with a small, closed feed, invite-only, no public discovery, no algorithm optimizing for engagement from strangers. I designed and built the product end-to-end: the feed, the curation logic, two built-in multiplayer games, and the infrastructure underneath it, live and in active daily use.
Signup is disabled entirely at the authentication level, the only way in is an admin-issued invite. That's a deliberate constraint, not a missing feature: the entire value of the feed depends on it staying small and trusted. Members sign in with a magic link, no passwords to manage.
A closed circle, by admin invite only
Rather than optimizing an infinite scroll for engagement, Daily Meow runs a scheduled job that picks a "Daily Meow" and a "Weekly Champion" from what's been posted, giving good photos a second life without anyone having to manually curate a highlight reel.
One pick surfaced from everything posted
Zoomies is a real-time side-scrolling obstacle race, solo against bots or head-to-head, run through a randomly generated house course, starring the same dressed-up cats from the app's Catwalk feature. Photo Scavenger Hunt is a weekly async game where members race to claim photo prompts before anyone else does. Neither needed to exist for the app to work; both exist because a private feed for five people gets a lot more fun with something to actually do in it.
A race and a scavenger hunt, not just a feed
Uploaded video is compressed server-side, not in the browser. A Supabase database webhook triggers a dedicated ffmpeg worker on Cloud Run, so a member can post a video and close the app immediately, the transcode finishes independently, capped at 1080p, H.264 CRF 23, without depending on their device or connection staying alive.
Upload, transcode, done, independent of the tab
Daily Meow is a React 19 + Vite PWA backed by Supabase for auth, Postgres, storage, and edge functions (invites, push notifications, link previews, and the daily/weekly curation jobs). It's deployed on Vercel and under active, daily development, the family it was built for actually uses it.