Karmah

Karmah is a purpose-driven startup reshaping how brands gather consumer feedback. Rooted in the core philosophy of LUCK — Love, Understanding, Compassion, and Kindness — the platform operates on a transparent exchange: honest opinions in return for real-world social impact.

Instead of relying on traditional, paid focus groups, Karmah engages users who are motivated by making a difference. By completing short surveys — known as “chimes” — or leaving open-ended voice notes about the brands they interact with, users trigger a donation of up to $2 to a charity of their choice. The experience is completely anonymous and smartly gamified; users can build daily streaks, collect “Koins”, and track the exact financial impact their answers have raised over time.

Karmah approached Bitcube in late 2024 with initial designs and a foundational database of brands and charities. They needed a technical partner to bring their vision to life and build a Minimum Viable Product from the ground up. Eighteen months later, we delivered a comprehensive, fully deployable digital ecosystem — a mobile application, a web platform, and the backend powering them both — ready for launch.

The project began with a clear mission: transform Karmah's initial static designs into a fully functional, cross-platform MVP. That required engineering two distinct applications — a Next.js web app and a Flutter mobile app — delivering an identical, seamless experience. Because the initial designs illustrated the visual screens but not the dynamic behaviours of real-time data, our design team worked continuously alongside the developers, evolving the experience as the platform came to life.

Karmah is a company built on listening, and their active market testing during the build provided real-world insight. Six months in, research revealed a clear user preference: people wanted to speak their feedback rather than tap through a survey. We embraced that pivot, shifting the platform's core focus to voice chimes. It required real-time audio capture with live transcription and completely reimagining the analytics engine to interpret unstructured, spoken sentiment rather than tallying multiple-choice answers.

Behind the scenes, the build required highly collaborative data architecture. Karmah's internal developer was building a custom admin tool managing brands, surveys and charities in MongoDB, while our API handled users, answers and the platform's digital economy in PostgreSQL. Both had to run in harmony while turning spreadsheets of raw data into a rich, searchable catalogue of thousands of brands.

Most importantly, because every completed chime triggers a real charity donation and awards in-app Koins, data integrity was non-negotiable. An answer lost or double-counted wasn't a display bug — it was real money. The architecture had to guarantee financial accuracy from day one.

The finished platform required two administrative surfaces. We designed and built the primary SuperAdmin tier directly into the web dashboard, letting Karmah onboard brands, approve access requests and manage the catalogue via a dedicated API. The one piece we didn't initially build was Karmah's internal database editing tool, though we took over its maintenance and extension in mid-2025. Underneath it all runs a CI/CD pipeline: GitHub Actions deploys the API to AWS Lambda and the transcription service to containers, while Bitrise handled mobile builds directly to App Store Connect. The Android build for Google Play ships from the same single Flutter codebase.