Gathr — activities, on demand.
A social discovery app for casual, short-notice activities. Want a tennis partner in the next hour? A jam buddy this evening? A hike this weekend? Gathr made it one tap, with a feed of nearby activities ranked by interest, time, and distance.
Spontaneous plans > group-chat purgatory.
Most activity-discovery apps in 2015 were event-listing platforms: things you booked weeks in advance. Gathr was the opposite — built for the next 60 minutes. Pick an interest, see who else nearby wants to do the same thing right now, send a one-tap request, meet up.
The product had to feel weightless: no chat, no profiles to fill in, no commitment beyond a single tap. Trust was built through interest-based matching, mutual approval, and a lightweight reputation signal after each meet-up.
Whole stack, one engineer.
I co-founded Gathr and shipped the product end-to-end — design system, native Android app, Node.js backend, AWS infrastructure, and the web marketing site.
- Native Android app with custom interest picker, geo-feed, and one-tap activity creation.
- Real-time feed ranked by interest match, distance, and time-to-start.
- Push-driven invitations with mutual-approval flow and lightweight reputation.
- Node.js + MongoDB backend on AWS EC2, fronted by a CDN-cached marketing site.
- Press & growth — national coverage in The Hindu, Economic Times, Deccan Herald, and more.
- Pivot & learnings — eventually wound down, but the playbook (interest graph + low-friction matching) shows up everywhere I've built since.
A walkthrough.
National coverage.
Gathr was featured in The Hindu, Economic Times, Deccan Herald, The New Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle, LBB, Bangalore Epicure, and The Inkline — an unusually strong run of organic media for a self-funded student-led app.