E-commerce with Linked Services MVP

Role: Full-stack Architecture & Implementation Lead

Overview

Llama Carlos is a telehealth community targeting the Latino population, helping people improve their well-being through guided education, product support, and personalized check-ins. When I joined, the team already had a strong mission, validated audience research, and a clear narrative—but they lacked the technical foundation to turn their concept into a functional service.

The main challenge was to launch an MVP quickly while keeping the system flexible enough to grow into a fully integrated digital health experience later on. The business needed not only a storefront to sell wellness products, but also a community space, guided onboarding flows, and a central backend orchestration layer to ensure data consistency across all touchpoints.

Approach

To support both high iteration speed and long-term viability, I designed a lean architecture centered around a Shopify storefront for e-commerce, Circle.io for community engagement and educational content, Jotform for onboarding and health questionnaires, and a custom Node.js (Typescript) backend that acted as the source of truth and the glue that linked everything together.

This approach allowed us to:

• Launch a polished, functioning product experience within weeks rather than months.
• Learn from real customer behavior immediately.
• Add and modify features rapidly without destabilizing the system.
• Keep ownership of the core business logic and user records in our backend, ensuring scalability and future extensibility.

Result

Within just a few weeks, Llama Carlos was able to put a real product into users’ hands, begin gathering feedback, and refine the service based on lived experience—not assumptions. The architecture supported fast iteration, clear feature expansion paths, and the operational workflows necessary to run the business from day one.

The MVP successfully bridged commerce, education, and guided care, forming the foundation for a larger telehealth ecosystem to grow upon.

Now the store receives hundreds of users every day seamlessly, continuously experimenting with pricing, messaging, and community engagement strategies in order to scale the brand to sky-high awareness and impact.