Why I built WannaBet on Contextual
WannaBet is a social app designed for friendly competitions—tracking challenges, placing bets with friends, and making everyday moments more engaging. When starting a new app, technical decisions can either help you move fast or slow you down. I wanted to focus on building a great product without getting stuck in backend infrastructure, API development, or scaling headaches. Contextual let me skip the overhead and go straight to building the app experience I wanted for WannaBet.
No Infrastructure Setup
One of the biggest points of friction in the early days of app development is setting up infrastructure—spinning up databases, servers, deployment pipelines – all of it. I’ve spent much of my career doing exactly that, and while I enjoy it, it takes time. But with Contextual, I could skip all of that. I just defined my data model and could immediately start working on the app frontend and core logic without getting bogged down in DevOps work.
Instant API Layer
Contextual automatically provides an API layer, making it easy to build and deploy a custom API. Instead of manually writing and maintaining REST or GraphQL endpoints, I could instantly generate them and customize the responses as needed. It also made it simple to add transformations and augment data before it reaches the frontend. This meant I could focus my time on the iOS and Android apps instead of writing boilerplate API code. I’ve already started taking for granted how much time this has saved me.
Built-in Scaling
Scaling is easy to put off as "a good problem to have" – until you actually have that problem. Contextual handles that. It dynamically scales to handle traffic spikes and I haven’t had to tweak database indexes, configure load balancing, or worry about it. It’s all abstracted away, but I still have the ability to tune the scaling parameters, if I want to.
SolutionAI: AI-Powered Coding Assistance
This was a surprise bonus for me. As a long-time backend developer, I haven't been wowed by many AI coding assistants. But I have been impressed by how helpful SolutionAI has been. Over the last few weeks, I've started using it more deeply and it's been very useful. I’ve used it to define data schemas, generate API endpoints, write code, and help debug logic errors. SolutionAI has allowed me to focus on the big picture rather than getting lost in low-level implementation details. It’s like having a second set of eyes – and a second set of hands.
Conclusion
My ninth-grade English teacher didn't really appreciate my in-class antics, but she did instill in me the need for a conclusion to anything I write. (My argument to her was that if someone reads what I wrote, they already know what's in the conclusion … but that argument didn't help my grades.)
Building an app well takes time and it's challenging enough without having to worry about backend infrastructure, APIs, and scaling. Contextual removed those pain points for me, so that I could focus on building the app experience I wanted to use. It gave me the speed I was looking for, without sacrificing quality and scalability. And now I've already started another app on Contextual.
