From idea to iPhone app

There is a moment in every founder's journey where they realize the map they were given was wrong. The old map said: have an idea, find a developer, wait months, launch, iterate. David Alonso, co-founder of Bloom and ETH Zurich robotics graduate turned mobile app revolutionary, is handing founders a new map. One where the distance between idea and working product is measured in minutes, not months.

David didn't plan to build Bloom. He planned to build robots. But somewhere between reinforcement learning research and quadrupeds, he fell in love with the tight feedback loop of app development, met a world-class design engineer in his co-founder, and the two of them started following an obsession that eventually led them through Y Combinator, a $3.5 million raise closed before Demo Day, and a product that left investors texting their friends mid-demo saying it was the best tech demo they had ever seen.

This episode is the story of what happens when you decide the bottleneck is not code. It is imagination.

The Core Problem Bloom Is Solving

Building a mobile app used to take David and his co-founder four months from idea to having it on someone else's phone. Four months. And that was with two technical co-founders who knew exactly what they were doing. For a non-technical founder, the timeline was effectively infinite. Bloom collapses that timeline to minutes by combining three opinionated technology choices into a single agentic coding experience:

Expo as the front-end framework, enabling one codebase to deploy to web, iOS, and Android simultaneouslyConvex as the backend, providing real-time sync between devices out of the box, full type safety, and a database that just works without configurationApp Clips as the distribution layer, an underutilized Apple feature that lets anyone open a fully native app from a single link without visiting the App Store, downloading TestFlight, or entering an invite code

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