Illya Bakurov
Co-Founder and Head of Mobile Development · Dec 2015 to May 2020
I built and led development across more than 20 iOS and web products, spanning social networks, audiobooks, video editing, utilities, and games. The work combined product judgment, mobile engineering, backend services, growth, and monetization.
Story Star was repeated zero-to-one product work. We explored consumer problems, built the product and its supporting services, learned from real usage, and either grew the result or moved on quickly.
The portfolio required native iOS engineering, web experiences, Firebase-backed services, media processing, social graphs, notifications, analytics, subscriptions, advertising, and the practical release work needed to keep many live products operating.
Recovered product archive
A public App Store archive preserves fifteen Story Star titles, while Spotlight is documented separately. Together they recover sixteen products from the broader portfolio.
Social video
A ranked feed for discovering, voting on, and submitting Snaps by topic. Snap acquired the product.
Snap
Audiobooks
A cloud audio player with variable speed and a public-domain catalog. The archived portfolio records 4,000 daily users and 70,000 books.
App Store archive
Social video
Discover and follow Snapchat creators without adding every account to the main feed.
App Store archive
Social networking
Save, revisit, create, and share Snapchat Stories.
App Store archive
Video editing
Place a chosen face into a video clip and share the result.
App Store archive
Camera effects
Face-tracked masks for transforming photos and videos.
App Store archive
Video Q&A
Anonymous video questions with face masking, voice distortion, and chat.
App Store archiveSocial Q&A
A social question-and-answer experiment built around provocative prompts.
App Store archiveLive video
A random video chat product for meeting people in seconds.
App Store archiveSocial video
A topical random-video product built around the 2017 fidget-spinner moment.
App Store archiveHealth utility
A focused reminder utility for building a consistent water-drinking habit.
App Store archiveLive video
A fast, lightweight random video chat experience.
App Store archive
Party game
A digital deck with six rule sets, including a custom mode.
App Store archive
Seasonal utility
A Christmas countdown revealing apps, music, books, and other surprises each day.
App Store archive
Party game
A truth-or-dare game with five themed modes.
App Store archive
Snapchat memes
Anonymous meme sharing and comments designed around Snapchat Stories.
App Store archiveArchive status
This archive covers the products whose names or listings still survive publicly. Additional experiments from the 20+ product portfolio are not yet documented here.
Selected work
I worked across product design, native mobile implementation, web, backend integration, release operations, analytics, and monetization. The products covered social video, audio, editing, utilities, and games, which forced the underlying patterns to become reusable.
I built Spotlight as a social product for discovering and ranking entertaining Snaps using Swift, Firebase, and the Snap SDK. It supported topic discovery, voting, creator profiles, and direct submission from Snapchat. Snap acquired the product and made Spotlight a core Snapchat feature.
The largest product reached more than 250,000 monthly active users, and the most profitable exceeded $20,000 per month. Building across many categories developed my habit of treating distribution, retention, reliability, and revenue as part of engineering, not as work that begins after launch.
Tools and systems
Public artifacts