// health tech · consumer mobile
Scaling a teen mental-health platform from 30 to 3,800+ users
Somethings connects teens with certified peer mentors — real humans, not chatbots. As founding principal engineer, our founder built the full stack and the AI systems behind it.
30 → 3,800+
active users
1.3M+
messages processed
58%
30-day retention
The challenge
Somethings pairs teenagers with Certified Peer Specialist mentors — people who've lived through mental-health challenges themselves. The product is safety-critical: real teens, real crises, clinical supervision requirements, and partnerships with health plans and state programs.
It needed a complete product built from scratch — mobile app, backend, and staff tooling — and then it needed to scale two orders of magnitude without breaking trust.
What we built
The full stack, owned end to end
A React Native app for iOS and Android, a Node.js/TypeScript backend, and React admin dashboards for the mentor and clinical teams — architected and built from day one.
An in-house AI ecosystem
Production MCP servers that expose platform data and tools to LLMs, and an agentic assistant (LangGraph, Claude, VertexAI) that lets non-technical staff query any platform data in plain English.
AI where it helps humans, not replaces them
Tone-matched reply suggestions delivered to mentors in under 3 seconds, and a memory system that surfaces patterns across a teen's history — the mentor stays in the loop, better informed.
Results
- Scaled from 30 to 3,800+ active users with 1.3M+ messages processed
- 58% 30-day and 25% 90-day retention — exceptional for a consumer wellness app
- AI systems run in production in a clinically supervised, safety-critical environment
Built by Plixy's founder in his role as founding principal engineer at Somethings — shown as representative of the engineering Plixy delivers.