Web · Mobile · Growth Systems · Compliance
itships is the studio of a full-stack, self-taught engineer who has shipped national consumer brands, split-test platforms, and app-store products — often solo. Web apps, native & wrapped mobile, and the conversion machinery that pays for it all.
Most projects don't start from zero — they start stuck. Pull me into what you already have: unstick the stuck thing, stabilize what's wobbling, clean up the codebase, ship the release that's been 'two weeks away' for six months. No judgment — every codebase has history.
Full-stack product engineering, from clean-sheet MVP to systems handling serious traffic — including massive SEO directories tuned to sub-200ms responses and 100-across-the-board Lighthouse scores. No overengineering; working software in front of you every week.
Native iOS and Android, or wrapped cross-platform when that's the smarter spend. Designed, built, and shipped to both app stores — product to publish, one pair of hands.
The machinery that makes money: split-testing platforms, funnels, attribution, email automation. Built the systems behind national consumer brands doing acquisition at scale — plus five years as a marketing-ops engineer untangling campaign tracking and reporting for very large companies.
Not every project is a platform. Sometimes the job is a fast, handsome site that brings customers in the door — booking, payments, local SEO — built to the same standard as the national brands, sized and priced for a small business.
The unglamorous work that makes systems talk: payment processing, third-party APIs and service integrations, data scraping, and wrangling messy datasets into models that actually perform. Twenty years of gluing things together — properly.
ADA/WCAG, CAN-SPAM, COPPA, cookie consent, PII handling, PCI-scoped payment flows. Twenty years around regulated consumer products means the little things that trigger lawsuits get built in — not bolted on. Not a lawyer: the engineer who maps your exposure before you pay one.
Backend & growth · 10 years
Third developer at one of the largest people-search brands in the US. Ten years engineering the systems that scaled it past a million unique visitors a day — databases, split-testing, email infrastructure, attribution.
Second brand · Full-stack
Launched on the heels of Instant Checkmate's wild success — and I built the first version. A second national consumer brand that doubled the team's experiment surface, backed by the same full-stack engineering.
Ticketing platform · Solo build
A full event ticketing platform — think Eventbrite, but queer: Stripe payments, recurring events, host teams, door check-in, native iOS/Android apps, and an AI event-discovery agent. Built entirely solo.
AI split-testing · Active build
A/B testing that runs itself. A/Bee generates hypotheses about why people convert, runs the experiments, promotes winners, and learns your audience — the split-test obsession from Instant Checkmate, rebuilt with AI at the wheel.
Clinical · Genetics pipeline
Started on the public-facing sites, worked my way into the lab — helping build the genetics testing pipeline behind personalized medicine. Clinical-grade software, written by hand, tested the way code must be when it touches patient results.
Hand-built · Years of growth
An ingredient-first recipe search engine: tell it what's in your pantry, it tells you what's for dinner. Hand-built — every layout, every query — and grown over years into a real success before the founder sold it.
Personal project · Search
A worldwide search engine for roadside attractions — the weird, wonderful stuff worth a detour, indexed and searchable. Now being reborn as an AI-assisted road-trip planner with an iOS app.
No spec yet? That's fine — planning is part of the job. I take projects from cocktail napkin to launch day: scoping, architecture, milestones, shipping, and the growth loop after. Small builds make the whole trip in one to two weeks; multi-year platforms keep the same rhythm — something real ships every week.
A short, sharp discovery. We define the smallest thing worth shipping — and flag the compliance landmines — in days, not months.
Working software from week one, demoed to you weekly. Infrastructure, database, API, frontend — one engineer, no hand-offs, no telephone game.
App Store, Google Play, cloud, your servers — launch is the requirement, not a stretch goal. The name of the studio is a promise.
Measure, split-test, iterate. Shipping is the start line; conversion is the score. This is the part most shops can't do — it's where I started.
itships is Nathan Cobb — a self-taught, full-stack engineer with 20+ years of shipped product behind him. Two decades of pattern recognition is how you get speed, top-shelf quality,and a genuinely competitive price from the same invoice.
No account managers. No hand-offs. No junior devs learning on your dime. The person you talk to is the person who designs the database, writes the API, builds the frontend, and ships the app.
And the conversation runs in your language, not mine — deep tech if you love it, plain English if you don't. Translating between the two is part of the job.
And it moves. Small builds go from scope to shipped in one to two weeks. The big ones — national platforms serving a million visitors a day — ran for years at that same weekly shipping rhythm. The speed is twenty years of pattern recognition, not cut corners; and with no agency overhead, the invoice stays honest.
Fair warning: I over-deliver. An exec once sized up my work-to-invoice ratio and told the founder, "either he's taking advantage of you, or he's an angel." No trick to it: if I'm not coding, I'm sleeping. I love this work, and I love helping people see a thing through. Expect more than you imagined.
One pair of hands, whole stack
Quotes are free. Tell me what you're building and I'll come back within one business day with questions, an approach, and a straight answer — including whether I'm the right fit. No sales sequence, no retainer pitch.
Your message is in my inbox. I'll reply within one business day — usually a lot faster — with questions, an approach, and a straight answer about fit.