Shipping a COVID contact-tracing product from zero to acquisition
VenueSafe served more than 1M Australians during the COVID response and went from idea to acquisition by me&u in six months.
1M+
Australians served
6 months
Idea to acquisition
2021
Acquired by me&u
3 repos
Product stack
Context
VenueSafe was built during the 2020 COVID response, when venues needed a practical way to collect visitor details, support contact tracing, and stay operational under urgent public-health constraints.
The product had to be fast, reliable, and understandable for venue operators and customers who had no patience for software friction.
What I Built
As co-founder and CTO, I built the product across a Craft/Vue marketing site, Express and MariaDB backend, React client, Stripe billing, analytics dashboards, and operational tooling.
The work was intentionally pragmatic: ship the useful version quickly, keep the flow simple for venues, and handle the operational edge cases that emerged as the platform scaled.
Outcome
VenueSafe served more than 1M Australians and was acquired by me&u, then operating as Mr Yum, within six months of the idea.
After the acquisition, I joined me&u as a senior software engineer, helped scale the platform to 15M+ users globally, and supported the US expansion from Austin, Texas.