I'm Hunter Kouchi (pronounced coach-ee), a recent college grad now working as a product manager in the API space. I'm super passionate about technology, entrepreneurship, and building products people love to use! When I'm not building, I'm probably watching the Carolina Panthers. I enjoy using technology to solve problems.
Things I've Built
Currently live in the App Store, MySpot helps you discover new date spots in New York City. Use code "friendsandfamily" to use the app (I really made this for my friends so don’t tell everyone). Developed with William Astilla in just 2 months, I created this app after struggling to find new date locations without bothering friends or drowning in Google Maps results. MySpot lets you swipe through recommendations, create playlists of places to visit, and share your opinions on favorite spots. I'm really proud of the intuitive design, ease of use, and it’s seamless integration with public APIs to create a fully rounded experience.
Currently live in the App Store!My first startup adventure and it was done with Rohit Nemani! The website was live for about 10 months and got 7,000 people to try our product before closing up shop. Learned a ton along the way. Shopdot tackled the headache of finding the right skincare products. You'd tell us your skin type, problems, and color, and we'd match you with products that actually made sense for you. Behind the scenes, we built a recommendation system using NLP (Natural Language Processing) to analyze reviews, classify products, gather ingredient information, and scrape tons of info from across the internet to create a single metric with what we called a dotscore. This experience taught me a ton about building out a team and a product.
XRTrial
A fun side project exploring Augmented Reality technology. I’m really intrigued by AR's potential applications, I built this app that uses the iPhone Pro's LiDAR sensor to measure object distances within the camera frame The app converts spatial data into a 2D grid visualization, with the ultimate goal of helping people with visual impairments better navigate their surroundings. While more of a technical prototype than a finished product, it allowed me to gain hands-on experience with AR development and experiment with accessibility applications.
Navigation Mapping
Fun school project using Boston Dynamics robot SPOT to measure more intuitive methods of navigation. Users would be tested on the speed they could get the robot to complete the maze between drawing on a maze or controlling in real time with a videogame controller.
The House Tab
A side project built with Will Astilla and Daniel Fang during our college days. We created a custom vending machine that connected to the Venmo API, letting party-goers purchase water using their phones. The system ran software that controlled a peristaltic pump connected to a water source, automatically dispensing the right amount when payment was received. While technically functional, we never actually deployed due to legal concerns! It was a fun technical challenge that combined payment processing, hardware control, and mechanical engineering.