OpenRoad

OpenRoad is one of the two projects I am proudest of, alongside Codaro, and my first project with large-scale traction. My co-founder Rasputin Carlson, from Seattle, founded it and built the iOS app. I joined as technical co-founder in January 2026, two days before the iOS launch, and took on Android.

It was not my project from the very beginning, which is why I count Codaro as the first product I built from scratch that reached traction. But OpenRoad is where I first worked on something used by tens of thousands of people.

Runners and cyclists have Strava. Drivers who love their cars and the roads they drive have nothing comparable: no simple way to keep a record of their drives, see their stats, or share a great drive with friends.

My official title is technical co-founder; Rasputin is the founder. I was the only person building Android: I started in January and we published the Android app on 31 March 2026. Since then I work on both Android and iOS.

Rasputin also writes code and leads marketing: short-form video, track-day filming and work with UGC creators. I help with marketing a little. Results like downloads and revenue belong to the team; the Android app and its billing are my work.

OpenRoad logs every drive automatically the moment the car moves, with the route, speed and stats. Drivers can talk to friends in convoy voice, drop markers on the map, see insights about their driving, navigate, and share a drive to Instagram with the overlay already built in. The app is available in 30 languages.

My part was a native Android app in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose with maps and drive recording, Google Play Billing for the paid tier, and a Firebase backend shared with iOS. It was my first mobile app, and I also work in Swift on the iOS side.

Building a second platform for an app that already had users meant matching what iOS users were used to, without copying iOS conventions onto Android. Both apps share one backend, so every data change had to work for both clients.

Subscriptions were the part that most needed to be boring. When a purchase completed but the server verification call failed, a paying user could end up without access. I changed the flow so access is granted locally as soon as Google Play confirms the purchase, verification retries in the background, and the server asks Play to resend notifications it cannot match yet instead of discarding them.

Growth came mostly from short-form video. Our best month was around April 2026, when two of our reels passed one million views each and revenue passed $10,000 in a single month. Marketing combines our own content, track-day filming and UGC creators, and the community grew to more than 30,000 followers on Instagram and over 1,000 members on Discord.

Live on the App Store and Google Play, with more than 50,000 drivers, a 4.7 rating on the App Store and 30 languages, as shown on openroaddrive.com.

More than $50,000 in revenue from in-app subscriptions, with more than $10,000 in our best month, around April 2026.

Two reels with more than one million views each, more than 30,000 Instagram followers and a Discord community of over 1,000 people.

In June 2026 Rasputin and I rented an apartment in Warsaw and lived and worked there together for a month, fully focused on OpenRoad. We shipped many new features in that month. Working that closely with a co-founder from the US also made my English much better.

OpenRoad was my first mobile app and my first time on a product used at this scale, with many challenges along the way. The next step is better marketing: the product is there, and I believe it still has a future.