Idea

An investor consultant for a big French luxury brand, let’s call him Pierre, has always dreamed of launching his own startup. Majoring in maths and having an analytical mindset, Pierre also knew that to successfully implement his project he needed to discuss his concept with a trusted software enthusiast, who had hands-on experience with startups. Pierre came up with a concept of a geo-based social network and after much discussion on his vision and the technical aspects with our project managers, the concrete implementation of an MVP started.

The idea behind the project is to create a platform where members can follow specific geographic locations and be in the loop of all posts tagged there: news, reviews, ads, photos, etc. Therefore, the focus from personal brands (like in the majority of social networks) is shifted towards locations, which become the primary interest of platform’s members. The number of posts generated in a particular spot defines its popularity.

Challenges

Pierre initially faced the following challenges: he did not have the required expertise to deal with a complex Web application, he had no team to support him and he had a limited budget. The goal was to develop an MVP to get traction for the new platform and later on get the first round of financing.

Solution

Vantino provided technical expertise and a team of developers with the aim of creating a scalable software product by following an agile approach. A crucial decision that was made right from the start was to adopt a microservices architecture, as it ensures better reliability and scalability as compared to monolithic applications.

Also, when it came to developing the mobile client app, we went for Flutter, a new Google framework that allows keeping one code base for developing cross-native mobile apps for both iOS and Android.

Here is a set of open-source technologies and cloud services we used:

• Microservices architecture & RESTful APIs
• Spring Framework
• Flutter Google framework
• Solr & Sevtin search engines for the full-text indexing
• Apache Spark for real-time analysis of events
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub for messaging and communication between distributed services
• PostgreSQL and Redis managed databases
• Keycloak IAM (Identity and Access Management) server for authentication and authorization
• Cloud-based Virtual Machines

By using open-source technologies and leveraging powerful existing cloud services, not only did we save time, but we also reduced the project’s cost for the client.

Vantino team’s adherence to best practices greatly helps in undertaking startup projects with customers, who do not have software engineering experience themselves but have concepts of great products. Our customers say that you can rely on our team and be sure that your requirements are met in a cost-efficient and timely manner.