Oxshag
Jan 2023
Why I built it
The premise of Oxshag was simple: you select 10 people who you fancy. If you both select each other, you are both notified; if not, the selections remain private.
I was teaching myself how to code and wanted to work on a project.
I thought it would be fun to spice up the Oxford dating scene.
How it went
The good: I ran a guerrilla marketing campaign which which drove 20,000 unique page views on the first day.
The bad: Because it was the first thing I ever properly built, I had to get scrappy. The easiest way I thought of to match people together was to add a drop-down menu of names. So, I scraped the Oxford uni database. Ironically, even after a 2 year stint studying law, the law was an afterthought, and I ran into data privacy issues — it turns out the GDPR is pretty strict.
The ugly: I was hoping for a Tech Crunch article, but instead I got one from The Times…
