Tech Web Support has delivered full-cycle development services to create a social network app that enables connections community to connect with each other, stay updated with the latest events, and even host own meetups.
CUSTOMER: VALLY
- BUSINESS NEEDS: If you need to enable a 12M students’ community to interact in a secure and advertisement-free environment – create your own social network app. Valley Connections decided to invest in social platform development to avoid relying on existing social media & address students’ needs in the best way.
- RESULT: Tech Web Support team was not new to social media app development and delivered the MVP within only 3 months. The solution impressed the first users and Valley Connections stakeholders a lot, so the team continued working on the platform and released it for 20 000 external users in July 2020.
TWS’ TEAM DELIVERED A ROBUST SOCIAL NETWORKING MOBILE EXPERIENCE WHICH ADDED A LOT OF VALUE FOR OUR CUSTOMERS
COLLABORATION OVERVIEW
Key Facts:
Valley Connections is one of the largest educational platforms in the world with more than 2 million students audience. They promote and innovate on transformational education through various mediums such as online learning, digital publishing, content, events, etc.
This approach implies much communication between community members, thus the customer involved Tech Web Support to deliver Valley Connections – a proprietary social network app for students to communicate in a secure, adaptive, and advertisement-free environment, tailored to transformational education specifics.
- Networking: users can browse other community members’ profiles, their posts and quests they attended, add people to the Close Friends list as well as mention each other in posts
- Messaging: users can send messages with different media content (text, photo, video) in private and group channels
- Events: users can browse, share, and join events organized by Valley Connections community members around the world, or host own local meet-ups
- Analytics: the system relies on advanced analytics to capture data about users’ journeys to enable data-driven UX optimization
History & process:
Valley Connections drafted the prototype and was looking for a social media app development company to deliver the app. We got shortlisted due to a number of positive references and expertise in mobile & social network development. Solid project delivery approach and ability to commit to a Fixed Price convinced the customer to cooperate with us.
We delivered the MVP in 3 months (1 month ahead of the schedule) and tested it with 300 users from the customer’s community gaining very positive feedback. Then we have switched to the Iterative approach for more flexibility and released a ready-to-market product in July 2020.
- Our specialists analyzed the prototype turning it into a detailed specification with 100+ User Stories & Acceptance Criteria
- Tech Web Support experts helped to prioritize the backlog defining the MVP’s “must have” features and came up with several suggestions regarding UX improvement
- The team provides regular status reporting, holds live demos, and provides the customer with Testflight access so that they could install all the builds anytime and check project progress
- Our specialists also supported UAT on the MVP, gathered & analyzed feedback, and prioritized further scope
Solution delivered:
Scalability and security become important when you create your own social media app as you want it to be future-proof, easy to maintain, and capable of supporting still more users in the future.
Valley Connections had selected the technologies they wanted to use already at the prototyping stage. While Swift & Kotlin were an obvious choice for native apps, the choice of Elixir seemed a bit exotic at first sight. But understanding customer’s ambitious plans, our experts fully agreed with the choice of Elixir as it would allow making the solution scalable, maintainable, and fault-tolerant in the future.
- Integration with SendBird Chat SDK for messaging in private and group channels
- Integration with Google Places API for location services support and events creation anywhere around the world
- Integration with MixPanel mobile analytics service to capture data about users’ activity in the app
- Admin Web Panel for content sorting and moderation delivered on top of Semantic UI Framework and Phoenix LiveView library
- The platform is hosted in Google Cloud configured to safeguard app availability and possibility to scale easily