Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Davidson.
Hi Joshua, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My story starts just outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, right as the Great Recession was hitting our region hard. Foreclosures, layoffs, small businesses closing their doors. That was the backdrop of my teenage years, and it shaped how I think to this day.
I fell in love with the internet early. As a young teenager, I built a fan site for Six Flags Great Adventure, the park every Jersey kid grew up loving, and it started earning real ad revenue. That was my lightbulb moment. If a kid from South Jersey could make money building things online, what else was possible?
So in 2009, at 16 years old, I founded Chop Dawg. I couldn’t even drive yet, so I went door-to-door on foot in the summer heat, asking small business owners one simple question: do you need a website? My first paying customer was a pet business in Egg Harbor Township called It’s a Doggy Dog World. We built their new site, their business took off, and word spread fast. Within six months, I had more than 20 customers, almost all through referrals. Looking back, it feels exactly right that a company called Chop Dawg got its start helping a pet business. The name itself came from a debate with my childhood best friend. I liked Top Dog. He liked Chop Shop. We compromised, and Chop Dawg was born.
I gave college three semesters, but the business kept growing and our industry moves too fast for textbooks, so I went all in. For a stretch, I was the teenage CEO running the whole operation out of coffee shops. Then the world went mobile, and we evolved from websites into full app and software development. That decision changed everything.
Today, Chop Dawg is an award-winning app development company headquartered in Philadelphia, entering our eighteenth year in business this August, which is pretty darn old in dog years. The kid going door-to-door became a global, full-time team of designers, engineers, and strategists that has launched more than 500 apps and digital products, with over 1 billion people using what we’ve built. Chop Dawg-backed apps have hit the Top 10 on the Apple App Store and Google Play within 24 hours of launch, many times over. We’ve had the honor of building for organizations like NASA, the US Navy, Wawa, Hilton, Siemens, MIT, Jefferson Health, and the NFL, alongside hundreds of first-time founders and startups, which will always be my favorite part of this work.
Along the way, I wrote a book called The Entrepreneur’s Framework, hosted podcasts, joined the Forbes Technology Council, contributed to publications like Entrepreneur and Inc., and took a seat on the governing board of Big Brothers Big Sisters Independence here in the Philadelphia area. But at heart, I’m still that kid from South Jersey knocking on doors. I just have a much bigger toolbox now.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Smooth? Not even close. I started a technology company at 16, in a recession, with no investors, no connections, and no driver’s license. Every early meeting started with someone deciding whether they could take a teenager seriously. I learned quickly that the only answer was to outwork and outdeliver every doubt.
The hardest chapter came in 2013, when I nearly lost the company. We were growing fast, I was saying yes to everything, and I learned my biggest lesson in business the painful way: never overpromise and underdeliver. That season forced me to build real systems, hire slowly, discover the power of saying no, and commit to a rule I still live by: tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. It’s why, to this day, our pricing is a fixed monthly budget with zero surprises, and why everything we build belongs to our partners from day one. That chapter became the foundation for my book, and for the company we are today.
Then there is the constant reinvention. Now in our eighteenth year in business, we’ve had to reinvent Chop Dawg through every major platform shift: websites to mobile apps, mobile to the cloud, and now the AI era. We went fully remote years before it was normal and had to learn how to build a strong culture across a distributed team. Today, we’ve embraced AI head-on, pairing the newest AI-assisted engineering tools with nearly two decades of discipline. Builds that cost $200,000 a few years ago can now land near $50,000, in roughly half the time, with the same quality and care. Meanwhile, the market is flooding with AI-generated apps thrown together in an afternoon with no real architecture or security behind them. That flood isn’t our competition. It’s our contrast. The easier it gets to make something, the more valuable it becomes to make something that lasts.
Here is the thing, though. Every struggle became a strength. Our 92 percent partner retention rate exists because of those scars, not in spite of them. Persistency and consistency. That has been the whole playbook from day one.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Simply put, we’re the partner behind your app’s success. Chop Dawg is an award-winning app and custom software development company headquartered in Philadelphia, serving founders and brands across New Jersey, the country, and the world. We help our partners build, scale, and succeed: iOS apps, Android apps, web apps, and AI-powered products built to last. Everything happens under one roof, from product strategy, UX/UI design, and engineering to quality assurance, launch, and long-term scaling, including HIPAA and GDPR compliant platforms for healthcare and other regulated industries. And it’s all done by a full-time, salaried global team across the US, Brazil, Pakistan, and India. No gig freelancers, no mystery subcontractors, just named faces our partners meet with every week.
What sets us apart is simple. We are partners, not a vendor. We don’t even use the word clients. From day one, we sit on the same side of the table as the people we build for, and everything we create is theirs from that first day: the code, the designs, the accounts, the intellectual property, 100 percent. Nothing ever gets held hostage. As I like to say, your baby stays your baby.
That mindset is why relationships that started with a single MVP have lasted a decade, and why our numbers look the way they do: our eighteenth year in business, 500+ products launched, over 1 billion users of what we’ve built, a 92 percent partner retention rate, and more than 300 five-star reviews. We are a three-time Inc. 5000 honoree, a four-time Inc. Power Partner Award winner, and we’ve ranked in the Top 10 of the Clutch 1000 for seven consecutive years. Our work has been spotlighted everywhere from The New York Times to NBC News, and Chop Dawg has even turned up on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Barstool Sports. Two stats I love most: in our entire history, we have never had an app rejected outright from the App Store or Google Play (we even got a professional cuddling app approved), and in all of 2025, zero projects ran over budget or behind schedule because of us.
We work with everyone from first-time entrepreneurs to enterprise teams, and so many of my favorite stories run right through this region. We reinvented the ice cream truck experience with Mister Softee, the same truck we all chased down the block as kids, and the app passed a million downloads in its first three months. If you’ve ever ordered a hoagie through the Wawa app, you’ve already used our work. We helped Slay by Mari become profitable within 12 hours of launch, with 15,000 women joining in the first 24 hours. We brought LA Gear’s dance and fitness community to life, built civic technology for the City of Peachtree Corners, Georgia, and through DiverseCity, a youth sports and recreation platform created alongside previous White House administrations, we watched a quarter of a million kids play, learn, and be seen in a single year. From my South Jersey roots to the founders we serve across the region today, so much of this story runs through New Jersey and Philadelphia, and that means a lot to me.
How we work matters as much as what we build. Design always comes before development, the same way a blueprint comes before breaking ground, because decisions are far less expensive on paper than in code. Every engagement starts with a complimentary 45-minute strategy consultation. Proposals are fixed monthly budgets agreed on upfront, so there are never surprise bills. Our partners get weekly calls, a shared Slack channel for the day-to-day, senior designers and engineers, and full ownership of everything we make, always.
What am I proudest of, brand wise? Longevity and trust. Development shops come and go, and plenty promise the moon on their way out the door. We’re still here in year eighteen, through every economic cycle and every platform shift, because we measure twice, cut once, and move with urgency without ever rushing. We believe technology should serve a purpose, and our purpose is helping people fulfill theirs. With everything AI now makes possible, I’d argue we are just getting started.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Building things people actually use. That feeling never gets old. There is nothing like launch day, watching an idea go from a whiteboard sketch to a live product in someone’s hands, then getting the text from a founder that their app just hit the charts or landed its first thousand users. I celebrate those wins like they’re my own, because in every way that matters, they are.
People make me happy. Watching teammates grow into leaders. Watching a first-time entrepreneur walk in with an idea in their noggin and walk out a confident CEO. I like to say we build the world’s best horse, but our partners are the jockeys, and nothing beats watching a jockey find their stride. Being surrounded by smart, driven, good people every single day is the greatest perk of this career.
And nothing hits home more than giving back. I’m honored to serve on the governing board of directors of Big Brothers Big Sisters Independence, headquartered in the Philadelphia area and one of the largest Big Brothers Big Sisters agencies in the nation, serving roughly 1,500 young people across Greater Philadelphia and South Jersey. One-to-one mentorship changes the entire trajectory of a kid’s life. I know because I was once a 13-year-old with big dreams and no roadmap, and the people who believed in me gave me one. Helping the next generation of kids in our region get that same shot makes this the most meaningful seat I hold at any table.
Family, above everything. Becoming a dad is redefining success for me entirely. Add our two dogs, one of whom moonlights on my Zoom calls, and you have my whole world. At the end of the day, happiness for me is progress plus people. I get to build, learn, and do it alongside people I care about, every single day. I’ve never lost sight of how lucky that makes me.
Pricing:
- Every product is custom scoped, so your investment always reflects your specific goals, features, and timeline. No cookie-cutter packages.
- Proposals are fixed monthly budgets agreed on upfront. No hourly billing, no hidden fees, ever. You pay month to month, and everything we produce is yours the moment it’s paid for, so you are never locked in.
- A realistic starting point: it’s rare for a team like ours to build and launch an app for the app stores under $25,000, and that number is a floor rather than an average. The good news is that AI-accelerated engineering has changed the math: builds that ran $200,000 a few years ago now often land near $50,000, and year-long timelines have compressed to about six months.
- Flexible ways to work together, from design-only engagements and MVP builds to full product development, ongoing support, and scaling. We keep it clean: no equity, no revenue share. Your product and your intellectual property stay 100 percent yours, from day one.
- Our 2025 report card: zero projects over budget or behind schedule because of us. The best first step is our free 45-minute strategy consultation at chopdawg.com. Zero cost, zero obligation, and you leave with a real action plan whether we end up working together or not.
Contact Info:
- Website: Website: chopdawg.com
- Instagram: Book a free strategy session: chopdawg.com/book-your-consultation
- Facebook: Email: hello@chopdawg.com
- LinkedIn: Facebook: facebook.com/chopdawgstudios
- Twitter: Phone: (800) 490-1476
- Youtube: Instagram: @chop_dawg
- Yelp: X (Twitter): @chop_dawg
- Soundcloud: Threads: @chop_dawg
- Other: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/chop-dawg-studios
