Samdroid
Samdroid Ltd · London

We build products people use.

A product and engineering studio founded by Samuel Koch. We take ideas from sketch to shipped, revenue-earning v1.

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12+ yrsshipping 0→1
3×startup CTO
EF10Entrepreneur First
ex-FacebookPhotos team
Selected work

Three chapters that tell the story.

Three products we took from the problem to something real people use. The full record lives in the portfolio.

Sprout

Sprout

Product & tech consultant

An AI-native data room for fundraising. Investors question the materials directly and every answer is sourced and cited, so the story is told accurately even when the founders are not in the room.

viasprout.com
Mobolize

Mobolize

Mobile SDK & technical sales

On-device data management and security, shipped as an SDK inside major telco customer apps. We built the features in Java, drove the integrations, and owned technical sales and enterprise support.

mobolize.com
The Zensory

The Zensory

Product & tech consultant

Focus and wellbeing app blending touch, sound and scent science. The founders brought us in as their product and technical partner: strategy, data analysis, API and backend build, and offshore team leadership.

thezensory.com
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About

One seat away from product, for our whole career.

Our founder, Samuel Koch, started as an engineer at Facebook, then spent over a decade as a startup CTO and founder making the product calls nobody else was in the room to make. Today, founders hire Samdroid to do the same for their ideas.

Read our story →

01Evidence over opinion

Talk to users before writing code. Kill ideas cheaply in discovery, not expensively in production.

02Scope is the product decision

An MVP isn't a smaller product. It's the sharpest question you can ship.

03Ship, measure, repeat

A launched v1 is the start of the conversation, not the end.

Contact

Building something? Or looking for a team that builds?

Tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you, honestly, whether we can help.

contact@samdroid.ltd LinkedIn ↗
About Samdroid

Engineer's rigour, founder's urgency, product person's obsession.

We're Samdroid, a product and engineering studio in London founded by Samuel Koch. We've spent our career at the start of things: the engineer at a global company, the CTO at startups, the founder betting our own time, and the team founders call when an idea needs to become something real.

Get in touch LinkedIn ↗
v1 SHIPPED
The story

We've spent our whole career one seat away from product. These days we say the quiet part out loud.

Samdroid starts with an engineer: a first-class Masters in Computer Science at St Andrews, then Facebook's Photos team in California, shipping features to hundreds of millions of people. Somewhere in there the questions that mattered most stopped being how to build it. They were whether to build it, for whom, and what to cut.

So we went where those questions live: startups. As a CTO with no PM in the room, the product calls landed on our desk. What makes the MVP. Which feature earns its roadmap slot. Which idea gets retired because the users said so. Sam co-founded companies, joined Entrepreneur First as a technical founder, and launched products of his own from nothing.

Today, founders hire Samdroid to do the same with their ideas: discovery, scoping, build, launch, and the honest iteration loop that follows. Develop, drive, deploy.

01Evidence over opinion

Talk to users before writing code. Kill ideas cheaply in discovery, not expensively in production.

02Scope is the product decision

An MVP isn't a smaller product. It's the sharpest question you can ship. Everything else waits its turn.

03Ship, measure, repeat

A launched v1 is the start of the conversation. Instrument it, listen to the data, iterate fast.

04Engineering fluency is leverage

We've sat in the CTO seat, so we can pressure-test estimates, find the efficient path to the same outcome, and keep trade-offs honest.

Work with us

For founders: from idea to first product.

Samdroid is how early-stage founders borrow over a decade of product and engineering experience, exactly when it matters most.

01 · DEVELOP

Idea → MVP scope

Discovery interviews, market sharpening, and a disciplined MVP scope: the smallest product that tests the biggest assumption.

02 · DRIVE

MVP → Launched v1

Architecture, build (hands-on or leading your developers), analytics instrumentation, and a launch you can learn from.

03 · DEPLOY

v1 → Traction

Iteration on live data, roadmap and prioritisation, and the investment and sales story to match. We've sat on both sides of the pitch.

Off the CV

A few more things worth knowing.

The thread through all of it is product: the craft of deciding what to build, for whom, and how you'll know it worked. We study it and practise it daily, and we bring a combination that's rarer than either half alone: real engineering depth attached to end-to-end product judgement.

BASELondon, UK
FOUNDERSamuel Koch
EDUCATIONMSci Computer Science, 1st Class, St Andrews
PROGRAMMESEntrepreneur First (EF10, London)
CRAFTDiscovery · MVP scoping · Roadmaps · UX · Analytics
HANDS-ONAndroid/Java · Node.js · APIs · AWS · Firebase
OFF-DUTYGolf (3 handicap) · Early-stage investing
Contact

Building something? Or looking for a team that builds?

Tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you, honestly, whether we can help.

contact@samdroid.ltd LinkedIn ↗
Portfolio

Products founded, built
and shipped.

Every engagement below follows the same arc: an insight, a bet, a build, and what the real world said back.

Sprout

Sprout

Product & tech consultant

An AI-native data room for fundraising: investors question the materials directly and every answer is sourced and cited, so the founder's story is told accurately even when they're not in the room.

INSIGHT investors already paste decks into ChatGPT. Better to give them an answer engine that can only draw on your documents.

ROLE we are the product and technical partner: shaping the product surface, the retrieval and citation model, and the workspace teams use internally.

LEARNED in private markets, trust is the feature. Cited answers beat clever ones.

viasprout.com
Captured from viasprout.com ↗
Gameway

Gameway

Samuel Koch, co-founder & CTO · 2016-2018

Swipe-based game discovery with personalised recommendations and a launcher, live on Google Play.

INSIGHT app stores are where game discovery goes to die; players choose by feel, not search filters.

BUILD the whole loop, solo: Android app, recommendation backend, analytics, push re-engagement.

LEARNED retention mechanics beat acquisition. The recommendation quality was the product.

Google Play
Screens from the Google Play listing ↗
Mobolize

Mobolize

Mobile SDK & technical sales

On-device data management and security, shipped as an SDK inside major telco customer apps: traffic protected and encrypted, Wi-Fi bonded with cellular, and mobile data saved.

ROLE we built SDK features in Java and supported their integration into partner apps, then owned technical sales and enterprise support alongside it.

LEARNED when your product ships inside someone else's app, integration support is the product experience.

mobolize.com Google Play
Screens from the Google Play listing ↗
Entrepreneur First

SoHome, at Entrepreneur First

Samuel Koch, co-founder · EF10 London · 2018

Our founder was selected onto Entrepreneur First, Europe's leading talent investor, as a technical founder, and co-founded SoHome: subscription-based renting for a generation locked out of ownership.

INSIGHT renting was broken for tenants and thin-margin for landlords; a subscription model could realign both.

BUILD rapid discovery: interviews with renters and landlords, MVP tests, weekly investment-readiness scrutiny.

LEARNED the discipline of testing your own hypothesis against evidence. EF's bar forces the product question daily.

joinef.com
The Zensory

The Zensory

Product & tech consultant

Focus and wellbeing app blending touch, sound and scent science. The founders brought us in as their product and technical partner.

ROLE we ran product strategy and data analysis, scoped and built the API and backend, and managed the offshore app and web teams.

BEYOND BUILD we shaped the roadmap, the investment story and the sales strategy with the founding team.

LEARNED an offshore team ships well when the spec carries the "why", not just the "what".

thezensory.com Google Play
Screens from the Google Play listing ↗
SportBuddy.io

SportBuddy.io

Product & mobile engineering

A sports and fitness network: find, match and chat with people near you, and with the gyms, clubs and bootcamps they train at. We shipped location-aware offer discovery and favouriting, so live offers are filtered by where the user actually is.

sportbuddy.io App Store
Screens from the App Store listing ↗
YouVouch

YouVouch

Data model & cloud architecture

A professional referrals and introductions network. We translated the business requirements into the product's data model and AWS architecture, ready for the team to build on. The site is no longer live; the screens below come from the Internet Archive.

youvouch.com (archived)
Captured from the Internet Archive’s copy of youvouch.com ↗
Tinbox

Tinbox

Samuel Koch, CTO · 2014-2016

Giving, redesigned: users donated $1 a day to charity, at no cost to themselves, with the money footed by corporate sponsors.

INSIGHT people want to give daily but friction and cost stop them; brands want authentic, repeat engagement.

BUILD full stack from scratch: apps, servers, database, a social newsfeed, user and charity profiles.

LEARNED a two-sided product lives or dies on the sponsor side. The consumer UX was the easier half.

Tinbox on CNET
Tinbox brand graphics · more in the CNET write-up ↗
Sponsors included Coca-Cola Unilever BNP Paribas
Facebook

Facebook, Photos team

Samuel Koch, software engineer · Menlo Park, California · 2013

Our founder shipped a new photo-sharing feature on the Facebook for Android app, used by hundreds of millions of people, plus newsfeed rendering performance work and saving photos to device. The lesson that stuck: at that scale every product decision is a measured experiment, and craft in the details compounds.

Contact

Building something? Or looking for a team that builds?

Tell us what you're working on and we'll tell you, honestly, whether we can help.

contact@samdroid.ltd LinkedIn ↗