Case study
Thingtesting: from employee #1 to Head of Trust
Four years building a review platform people trust: 0 to 100,000+ reviews, read more than 50 million times.
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Engineering → Head of Trust
- Client
- Thingtesting
- Stack
- TypeScript, Next.js, NestJS, GraphQL, TypeORM, PostgreSQL, GCP, Terraform
Context
Thingtesting started as an Instagram account and became a review platform with hundreds of thousands of testers, 20,000+ brands and around a million monthly users. I joined in early 2021 as employee #1, fully remote, and stayed four years, through the platform’s growth and its acquisition by ShopMy.
Building the platform (2021–2025)
I built the review platform itself and helped take Thingtesting from 0 to 100,000+ reviews, read more than 50 million times by millions of unique visitors. TypeScript across the stack: Next.js, NestJS, GraphQL and TypeORM on PostgreSQL, running on Google Cloud with Terraform.
While the team was hiring for design, I filled the UI/UX role too, and designed the shop experience on Thingtesting.
Head of Trust (2023–2025)
A review platform is only as valuable as its reviews are honest. As Head of Trust I was responsible for keeping reviews and content trustworthy: combating fraud and fake reviews, and detecting new threats to the platform as it grew.
Joakim is one of those developers who truly elevates a product. He has a keen eye for design and deeply cares about building experiences that people genuinely enjoy using. It’s the little things, the subtle animations, the thoughtful interactions, the polished UI, that he obsesses over, and it makes all the difference. Beyond aesthetics, Joakim is incredibly data‑driven, always pushing the team to test assumptions, encouraging A/B tests, and diving into metrics to make informed decisions that move the needle.
Damien Timewell, CTO, Thingtesting