Zabihah

Zabihah

Built an entirely new web, iOS, and Android platform for the biggest brand in the Muslim food space serving over 250k+ worldwide users that led to an acquisition by a $50M+ company.

Project Overview

Zabihah, the world’s largest halal restaurant guide, underwent a full platform rebuild across web, iOS, and Android. The project modernized a 20-year-old legacy system, integrated Shopify for ecommerce, and delivered a fast, scalable product aligned with the company’s fundraising efforts.

Technologies Used

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • Vercel
  • Microsoft Azure
  • MySQL
  • Supabase
  • Tailwind
  • Shopify

Service Type

Full Stack Development, Mobile App Development, Team Augmentation, Offshore Service Migration

The Challenge

Zabihah had grown into the most authoritative halal restaurant guide online, but its platform was showing its age. The website was running on a legacy stack, the mobile apps were outdated or nonfunctional, and the user experience had fallen behind modern standards. They needed a full-scale rebuild — not just a visual redesign, but a fundamental re-architecture that could handle a global directory, community reviews, and location-based search at scale. The challenge was to respect the brand’s legacy and existing data, while modernizing every layer of the stack for performance, scalability, and user engagement.

Beyond rebuilding the core halal directory, Zabihah’s leadership had a new vision: to expand into ecommerce by offering curated halal products and merch directly to users. This meant the new system needed to support both content and commerce. Seamless user experiences across web and mobile was needed, along with a robust backend that could handle reviews, listings, moderation, and product purchases. The challenge was not just modernization, but transformation.

The Solution

The project began with a comprehensive technical audit and full operational transition from Zabihah’s offshore team in Pakistan. I was responsible for decoupling the platform from its legacy architecture, migrating source code, databases, media assets, and infrastructure configurations into a unified, version-controlled environment. This required reverse-engineering undocumented features, deprecating unstable components, and reconstructing internal logic based on fragmented knowledge and business intuition. The goal was not just to migrate but to fully reclaim technical ownership and create a clean foundation for rapid product development.

Following the handover, I re-architected the entire stack with a focus on modularity, performance, and maintainability. I sunset the existing Azure deployment in favor of Vercel, consolidating frontend, backend, and CI/CD under a single platform. This allowed us to take advantage of serverless architecture, atomic deployments, and preview environments per pull request — reducing monthly infrastructure costs while improving developer velocity. The simplified deployment pipeline eliminated the need for DevOps overhead and supported instant rollbacks and branch previews.

The web application was rebuilt from the ground up using Next.js (App Router), leveraging static generation (SSG) and incremental static regeneration (ISR) to serve core pages at speed with real-time freshness. I carefully optimized performance for an image-heavy platform, paying close attention to LCP, FCP, CLS, and INP metrics. The backend logic — including restaurant search, filtering, and user content handling — was implemented using Vercel Edge and API functions, removing the need for a dedicated server or traditional backend framework.

For mobile, I led the team in the development of fully native iOS and Android applications, written in Swift (UIKit) and Kotlin (Jetpack Compose). These apps were not cross-platform abstractions but purpose-built for their respective platforms, taking advantage of native capabilities. They support features like geolocation-based search, user profiles, content sync, and push notifications, all integrated with the unified backend for a social feed component designed to increase usage.

A major deliverable was preparing the platform for first-party ecommerce. Zabihah wanted to launch a product catalog of halal goods alongside its restaurant directory with third party food distributors. I integrated Shopify via the Storefront API, creating a seamless in-app and in-browser shopping experience that aligned with the brand’s user journey. Checkout, payment processing, and fulfillment were handled entirely within Shopify’s ecosystem, allowing us to avoid maintaining a redundant payments or inventory system.

This entire transformation occurred while Zabihah was actively raising their next round of funding. I was entrusted to lead the technical direction, architecture, and execution during this high-stakes phase. The stability, performance, and ecommerce capabilities of the new platform were presented as part of their investor pitch — demonstrating both modernization and a credible path to monetization at scale.

The result is a performant, maintainable, and revenue-ready platform deployed entirely on serverless infrastructure, with a clean frontend/backend separation, native mobile apps, and an ecommerce stack that requires no additional ops burden. Now supporting hundreds of thousands of monthly users, the platform is positioned for long-term growth and product expansion and was acquired by River, a $50M+ company.