His Vision Worked. The Platform Couldn't Carry It.

Ted Shimer built The Freedom Fight to reach people wherever they were. He needed to know if the platform underneath it could carry a growing, global community.

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Ted's Story

Ted Shimer founded The Freedom Fight in 2015 with a vision: build something that could reach people wherever they were, and give them a place to belong to as they worked through something hard, together.

He Built It Almost Entirely Himself
Ted built the platform that vision needed almost entirely on his own in the early days, and it worked. The Freedom Fight grew into a real digital platform with a genuinely global, distributed user base, offering people daily check-ins, community, and support wherever they happened to be in the world.

What He Couldn’t See
But the platform that got Ted’s vision off the ground wasn’t built for what it eventually had to carry. As the user base grew, the foundation underneath it didn’t grow with it, it got harder to manage, more fragile every time something new was added, and increasingly fragmented across the different ways people were trying to use it. Ted could see the mission working. What he couldn’t see literally was what was happening inside his own platform once it was live. That’s when a friend pointed him toward Rubico.

The Challenge

Ted did everything right for the stage he was at, he built a real, working platform solo, and it grew into something with genuine global reach. But that same growth surfaced questions Ted couldn't answer from the inside:

“Why does fixing one thing keep breaking something else?”
“Why do we have three different codebases for one product? ”
“How do I know something's broken before a user has to tell me?”

The platform worked. Ted just didn't have visibility into what was actually happening underneath it once real, global usage hit. That's the gap Rubico came in to close.

Documented Position

A unified PWA foundation now powers web, iOS, and Android from a single codebase, with 25+ automated monitoring scenarios providing built-in visibility.
Prioritized Roadmap

Native payments across Stripe, Google Play, and iOS provide a clear path to real, scalable monetization.
Ongoing Engineering Partner

What started as a platform fix has evolved into a long-term technology partnership.

How Ted and Rubico Worked Together

Rubico rebuilt The Freedom Fight’s foundation from the ground up, rather than patching around the fragility:

Infrastructure Stabilization
Replacing a fragile, hard-to-manage foundation with one built to hold up under continuous updates, plus 25+ automated monitoring and alert scenarios giving the team visibility into production issues before users ever noticed them.

One Codebase, Every Platform
A shared Progressive Web App (PWA) codebase eliminating duplicated development across web, iOS, and Android, alongside a modern, unified UI with simplified user journeys replacing the platform’s fragmented flows.

Monetization, Community & Data
Natively integrated multi-platform course monetization (Stripe, Google Play, iOS in-app purchases), interactive community features like group chats and daily check-ins, and a Power BI analytics layer built on a semantic data foundation for future AI-driven insights.

Codebase, replacing 3 Web, iOS, and Android unified under one PWA.

25+

Automated monitoring scenarios Catching production issues before users ever noticed them.

Payment rails, natively integrated Stripe, Google Play, and iOS in-app purchases.

What Jeremy (Product Owner) Has to Say?

“Our combined team is in a better place now than a year ago, and I look forward to growing an even stronger team. The Rubico team is great at reacting to priority changes. Our meeting cadence supports reiterating the priorities, and everyone seems to be on the same page when priorities have to change. Our delivery cadence gets upset by changing priorities, but we know that will be a second-order effect of changes. Having access to a broader team at Rubico is great to be able to answer questions, such as with transferring an App in the App Store. ”

— Jeremy, Product Owner