What happens when an Android engineer stops thinking in terms of “just an app” and starts building a full product? In this talk, I share the real story behind building Paglipat.com, a travel search platform designed to help users compare flights, hotels, and transport options across multiple providers. Rather than giving a polished success story, this session focuses on the engineering decisions, trade-offs, mistakes, and lessons learned while turning an idea into a working platform.

I’ll walk through why I chose Kotlin Multiplatform for shared business logic, Ktor for backend APIs, Supabase for authentication and data, and Next.js for the web experience. I’ll also cover what did not work as expected, including why Compose Multiplatform for Web was dropped early and what that taught me about choosing the right tool for the right layer. The goal is to give attendees a practical, honest case study on architecture, product thinking, cross-platform strategy, and how to make better technical decisions when building something real from scratch.