Case study
From 1 star to 4-5: rescuing a React Native community app
Took over The Litas Collective, a social network for women motorcyclists, in critical state, and led the stabilization and rebuild.
- 1★ → 4-5★
- store rating, sustained
- 1,000+
- users reactivated in the first 2 weeks
- 3,000
- new users over the following year
- 10-100
- new users per week
The situation
The Litas Collective is a community of women motorcyclists across the US and Canada. The community was big; the app was not keeping up with it. When we took it over, the React Native codebase had severe technical debt (monolithic files, bugs in basic interactions), the feed took minutes to load, core flows were broken, and the app sat at 1 star on both the App Store and Google Play. Churn was consistently outpacing acquisition.
What I did
I led a team of five: two developers, a designer, a product owner, and a marketing lead.
- Found the real friction. We cross-referenced public reviews, support tickets, and the app’s actual behavior to rank the problems by how much they hurt users, not by how ugly the code was.
- Stabilized first. Two weeks of fixes on the worst breakages, released to a beta group of trusted community members who told us quickly whether it was working.
- Then rebuilt. Two months of rebuilding, including a UX redesign and shutting down features nobody used. Fewer features, all of them working.
Outcome
- More than 1,000 users came back in the first two weeks after launch.
- The rating went from 1 star to a sustained 4 to 5 stars.
- For the next year, the app added 10 to 100 new users every week, about 3,000 in total.
The lesson I keep from this one: when a product is on fire, sequencing matters more than speed. Stabilize, earn back trust with a small group, then rebuild.