Vantino Helps Build Another Startup

Idea

An investment consultant for a major French luxury brand — let's call him Pierre — had long dreamed of launching his own startup. With a maths background and an analytical mindset, Pierre knew he needed to discuss his concept with a trusted software partner who had hands-on startup experience. He came to us with the idea of a geo-based social network, and after several conversations on the vision and technical trade-offs with our project managers, MVP development began.

The platform lets members follow specific geographic locations and stay in the loop on everything tagged there — news, reviews, ads, photos. Unlike most social networks, the focus shifts from personal brands to locations, which become the primary unit of interest. A location's popularity is defined by the number of posts generated around it.

Challenges

Pierre faced three challenges: he lacked the in-house expertise to deliver a complex Web application, he had no team, and his budget was limited. The goal was to ship an MVP that would gain traction and unlock a first round of financing.

Solution

Vantino provided technical leadership and a development team to build a scalable product with an agile approach. The first critical decision was to adopt a microservices architecture — more reliable and scalable than a monolith. For the mobile client, we chose Flutter, Google's then-new framework that keeps a single codebase for native iOS and Android apps.

The open-source and cloud stack we used:

• Microservices architecture and RESTful APIs
• Spring Framework
• Flutter (Google)
• Solr and Sevtin for full-text search and indexing
• Apache Spark for real-time event analysis
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub for messaging between distributed services
• Managed PostgreSQL and Redis
• Keycloak IAM for authentication and authorisation
• Cloud-hosted virtual machines

Combining open-source and managed cloud services let us ship faster and at a lower cost for the client.

Vantino's discipline around engineering best practices makes us a strong partner for founders who have a great product idea but no in-house software expertise. Our customers tell us they can rely on the team to deliver on requirements — on budget and on time.