project details
PRIVIYO
What Was Broken
Keeping up with friends at a distance feels like work. Group chats are noisy, text updates feel robotic, and nobody actually reads long messages. The result: people drift apart not because they don't care, but because the tools make connection feel like effort.
solid infrastructure, complex privacy logic, being validated in small communities
What I Bet On
That the right format changes everything. Short videos feel alive in a way text never does; but public social media adds performance pressure. We bet on combining TikTok-style viewing with WhatsApp-style privacy: every video is only visible to the specific group it was shared with.
“We didn't want another social network. We wanted a way to actually feel present in each other's lives.”
— Etuna, Co-founder
What Happened
Still in V0. The data architecture is solid and built to scale; auth runs on Supabase; the privacy and visibility logic is the open problem we’re solving in real time through direct user feedback and 1:1 interviews with early communities.
Chapter by chapter
The Story
V0 — Architecture First
We started with the hardest part: the data model. Priviyo isn’t a simple feed app; the core mechanic is that every video is visible only to a specific, hand-picked group. That kind of granular privacy doesn’t come for free. We started with pure PostgreSQL, then pivoted to Supabase when auth complexity got in the way. It gave us authentication out of the box and let us stay close to the database layer we’d already designed. The schema didn’t change. The infrastructure got smarter.
Earning the Insight
We’re not chasing scale yet. We’re building in small communities, watching how people actually use it, and running 1:1 interviews to understand where the friction is. The privacy and visibility logic is still the hardest thing to get right; edge cases show up constantly. Every interview surfaces one more scenario we hadn’t thought of. That’s the point.
Give Me Your Opinion
seriously, I want to hear it
Mascotte
A group-based food discovery app built a year earlier — same idea of sharing within a defined circle, simpler data model. Proof the mechanic works before Priviyo took it further.