// 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.