How SMore scaled its technology and user base ahead of its acquisition by Tawkify | Avion Advisors

From differentiated product to scaling constraint

S’More had built a differentiated position in online dating around conversation, content, and progressive discovery rather than conventional swipe-based interactions. As the product gained traction, however, the technology underneath the experience needed to support a much more complex consumer platform.

Video, rich-media profiles, messaging, identity verification, security, mobile deployment, and rapidly increasing user activity all had to operate through a scalable and reliable technology environment. The existing Heroku-based architecture was increasingly limiting the company’s ability to develop, release, and scale new experiences with control.

Avion worked alongside founder Adam Cohen-Aslatei across product, engineering, infrastructure, growth, and capital, approaching the challenge as a platform-scale transformation rather than a series of isolated technology projects. The initial engagement included migration to AWS, secure data migration, Terraform, containerized development, and CI/CD infrastructure.

Building the technology underneath growth

The central question became:

Avion helped redesign the underlying environment across cloud infrastructure, application architecture, security, deployment, mobile release processes, autoscaling, and operating continuity.

The future-state architecture incorporated AWS infrastructure, infrastructure as code, VPC and access controls, automated CI/CD, containerized deployment, resource optimization, autoscaling, and improved iOS, App Store, and TestFlight release processes.

At the same time, the platform continued expanding its consumer experience across video, interactive profiles, ephemeral chat, progressive photo reveal, behavioral features, and identity verification. S’More’s product materials describe a content-led relationship platform where video, voice, music, maps, messaging, and verification increasingly operated as part of one integrated experience.

"Technology creates strategic value when better infrastructure enables better products, stronger engagement, and greater optionality for the business.”

The goal was not infrastructure for its own sake. It was to create a technology system capable of supporting faster product development, greater user activity, richer experiences, and continued growth without allowing complexity to become a constraint.

From technology transformation to strategic value

Avion supported implementation across cloud infrastructure, product development, deployment, scaling, and quality assurance while also working beyond the formal technology scope across investor materials, capitalization, fundraising, financial planning, and growth analysis.

The work connected several capabilities that had to mature together:

• Scalable cloud and application infrastructure
• Mobile product and release capability
• Identity, verification, security, and trust systems
• Video, content, and engagement experiences
• User-growth and monetization intelligence
• Investor and strategic-acquisition readiness

By mid-2022, S’More reported approximately 380,000 users and 127,000 monthly active users, alongside 45% quarterly growth, 62% Day-1 retention, and 51% Month-1 retention.  The company also reported that its monthly active user base had doubled within two quarters and that its overall user base had grown fivefold since its previous funding round.

By February 2023, S’More had grown to more than 450,000 users before being acquired by matchmaking company Tawkify. Tawkify specifically cited S’More’s mobile product and app-building capabilities as strategically relevant to its expansion into digital services.

The durable capability was S’More’s ability to continuously translate technology into product innovation, product innovation into engagement, and engagement into scalable consumer growth—creating a more strategically valuable platform ahead of its acquisition.

For Avion, this is Regenerative Innovation in practice: each product release, customer interaction, and operating cycle could generate additional technology capability, customer intelligence, and strategic optionality rather than simply adding complexity.

Sovereignty gained: Greater technological control, product-development velocity, customer insight, scalability, and strategic optionality.

Capability regenerated: Engineering knowledge, consumer intelligence, trust infrastructure, content capability, growth systems, and investor readiness.