02 · ALE Brands
Becky
Purposeful love that feels like home.
Matchmaking for Africans and Black people abroad who are ready for something real. I'm the founding engineer at ALE Brands and led engineering on Becky as it grew from 800 to nearly 3,000 users.
- Role
- Founding engineer, engineering lead
- Timeline
- Feb 2026 – now
- Team
- With Clinton Imaro on the backend
The problem
A dating app for marriage-minded people lives or dies on two things: whether the profiles are real, and whether people stay long enough to meet someone. Most of my work on Becky was in service of those two.
01
Trust is the product
Every profile photo is checked by an AI verification step and normalised before it's saved. Sign-in is email OTP, Google or Apple, with rate limits on every auth endpoint, so fake and spam accounts are expensive to make.
Matches come with a reason ("You both share a strong commitment to meaningful connections") rather than a bare percentage, so people know why they're looking at someone.
02
Onboarding people actually finish
A half-finished profile is a dead end for everyone who sees it. I built onboarding as short steps with a photo-upload carousel that shows progress, and added daily reminder emails for incomplete profiles. Paying is a time-limited offer on a RevenueCat paywall rather than a wall in front of the first match.
03
Tools for the team behind it
The team needed to see what was happening without asking me. I built an admin dashboard with live overview metrics and sparklines, user management with bulk actions, in-app feedback forms, push notifications, promotions and a view of WhatsApp users.
04
Two front doors
Becky at the Well tells the story; Download Becky gets people into the app. I led the work on both alongside the app.
What I built
- ~3,000
- users, up from 800
- $3k+
- monthly revenue
- 3
- platforms: iOS, Android, web
- Mobile app: auth (email OTP, Google, Apple), onboarding, profiles, camera uploads, home feed, promotions, RevenueCat paywall
- Backend services: AI photo verification, OTP and rate limiting, Resend emails, incomplete-profile reminder jobs, reviewer access
- Admin dashboard (becky-monitor): metrics, user management, feedback, notifications
- Both marketing sites
Next project
GrowALE
Ditch the boring CRMs.
View case study