KBum — The most exciting way to shop online

Colombian e-commerce faces an attention problem: the traditional online store model is predictable and undifferentiated. Users shop, pay list price, and that's it. There's no excitement, no reason to come back beyond necessity.

KBum was born with a radical proposition: turn shopping into a competitive experience where each participant has the opportunity to acquire new products at prices up to 90% below retail value. The mechanism is simple — each bid increments the price by one Colombian peso — but its dynamics create an addictive and fair experience.

The founding team had clarity on the business model but needed technical and UX guidance before committing resources to development. The key questions were: what architecture supports real-time auctions with multiple concurrent users? How do you design an onboarding flow that doesn't lose the user before they experience the product? What stack allows fast iteration without mortgaging future scalability?

My role was as a technology consultant — working with the founding team before and during the development process, which was carried out by a separate development team.

In the architecture phase, I defined together with the development team the data model for real-time auctions and the test suite to validate we were on the right track: clear separation between the auction engine (strict consistency, atomic transactions to prevent race conditions) and the user frontend (eventual consistency, optimistic updates for perceived speed). This design decision was the most critical in the project, as with the first prototypes we faced each of these challenges.