JuJu - Your Story, Your Stage | jrtilak.dev
JuJu - Your Story, Your Stage

JuJu - Your Story, Your Stage

A mobile app for short-form content that empowers users to share moments, express creativity, and connect with a vibrant community.

Professional Dec 2024
Express.jsMongoDB

The Problem

Most short-form platforms are built around video only. JuJu was built for creators who live in both worlds — video and music. The goal was a mobile-first community where anyone could share clips, post music, go live with followers, and actually get discovered — not buried in a generic feed.

What We Built

I was the primary backend developer, working with a co-developer who handled authentication and a Flutter dev on the frontend. Our work covered the core of what makes the platform actually function.

Video pipeline — Uploads don’t just get stored. The backend handles compression, audio extraction, and automatic thumbnail generation before a post goes live.

Recommendation engine — Videos are tagged on upload. The engine tracks user interactions — watch duration, replays, comments, shares — and calculates a relevance score per user. The feed is composed of 80% high-score matched content, 10% trending videos, and 10% noise to surface newer creators. Fresh uploads from followed accounts are prioritized, and content from blocked users is filtered out entirely.

Live streaming — We integrated Cloudflare’s live streaming service so users can broadcast in real time and others can tune in live.

Content moderation — We built a manual moderation system where users can report content and moderators can review and take action on flagged posts.

Everything is served through a REST API consumed by the Flutter app.

Technical Challenges

The recommendation engine was the hardest part — I had never built one before. I worked through the design with my senior developer, learning scoring logic and content distribution hands-on. Live streaming integration with Cloudflare was similarly new territory and took time to get familiar with before things clicked. Both were deep-end problems solved by working through them.

Results & Impact

JuJu is live on both the App Store and Google Play at jujuconnect.com. It has around 100 users and is still active. The user base is early-stage so large-scale stress testing hasn’t happened yet — but the infrastructure is built for it.