Pullu

Physical stamps got the aesthetic right; digital stickers didn't

Physical stamps felt dated but they got one thing right: consistency within a boundary and a shareable physical object. Digital stickers are the opposite — boundless, inconsistent, disposable. There was something in between: a small digital object with recognisable aesthetic rules that could be created and shared. Pullu started from that gap.

Renderer first, UI second

Building a design tool looks simple until you skip a solid renderer and go straight to the UI layer — that's one of the more expensive mistakes to unwind. For Pullu I established the canvas-based render engine first: stamp frame, inner area, perforated edge, layer order. Every edit the user makes needs real-time preview, and that preview needs to be pixel-perfect against the exportable output.

React Native has no direct canvas access; I built both the preview and export pipeline through Expo's ecosystem and community libraries. Compositing layers in the right order and keeping the stamp frame fixed during export was a small but critical detail.

Supabase handled both user authentication and design storage. The social sharing flow was kept deliberately short — sharing a stamp design should take no more than two steps.

Why canvas rendering is tricky, and why Expo made sense

Native canvas access doesn't come as cleanly in React Native as it does on the web. But Pullu's core value proposition is visual output quality — so the tradeoff had to be accepted and the ecosystem chosen carefully.

Expo managed workflow avoided writing native builds with every update. The target audience is on both iOS and Android — managing that from a single codebase is dramatically more efficient than splitting into separate native projects. Supabase again collapsed storage, auth, and realtime into one place quickly.

What shipped

An iOS and Android app where users can create, save, and share their own stamp designs. The stamp frame and perforated edge stay fixed throughout the design process — the goal is to feel like a stamp, not just any sticker.