Case Study
Nova Sport
Nova Sport is a new social network that lets students connect and play sports together and gain access to their university’s sports classes.
The challenge
As a bootstrapped startup, Nova Sport had a limited budget to build and launch the initial MVP. The MVP needs to be ready and launched in time for the next semester, so it needs to be developed quickly. The backend system needs to be able to handle thousands of concurrent users at launch and eventually scale to millions of users when it becomes successful. And given the budget limitations, it also needs to be cost-efficient.
Having had a failed launch with a previous implementation that ran on two PHP servers, the pressure is on to deliver a working and scalable solution and do it quickly and within budget.
Our journey together
I worked with the founders, Amir and Karam Fattal, to identify the project requirements and I designed and implemented the backend for both the mobile app and a CMS in 4 weeks.
My tasks included:
- Set up the AWS Organization, AWS accounts, organization units and service control policies.
- Set up audit trails (through CloudTrail) and user access (with AWS SSO).
- Follow security best practices for managing a multi-account environment.
- Built the AppSync APIs for both the mobile app and the CMS, including all the constituent Lambda functions, DynamoDB tables, etc.
- Set up CI/CD pipeline for both dev and production environments.
- Ensure we have good observability into what’s happening in the application and are able to debug and troubleshoot problems quickly.
- Set up operational dashboards and alerts for the production environment.
We delivered the MVP on time and on budget and the investors were extremely impressed by how much we were able to achieve with the limited budget. The app was well-received and had over 15k organic installs within the first few weeks before the 2nd coronavirus lockdown in Belgium. There have been no reported issues with the app since the launch, and we have already implemented many enhancements and new features based on feedback.
“I definitely enjoyed collaborating with Yan. We launched the app successfully with Zero issues from the back-end side, and thanks to that successful launch, we are now able to go further in the development and continue building on what we have. Building an app is easy, building an app without bugs is a challenge, but building a fully functional back-end that could scale to millions while being cost-efficient is quite an achievement!”
Amir Fattal, Co-Founder, Nova Sport
“Yan was a key factor for the success of the launch of the app on the technical side. He cared about every detail and took his time to understand each task, thanks to him we made better decisions that made us stay on the budget, keep the app safe and go even faster. Yan is passionate about what he does, he took his time to explain to us why certain tools and technologies are fit for our project, which is very interesting for us to learn. We had a very limited budget for launching the app but still, we have chosen Yan to work on the project, why? Because it is simple math, Yan can go 3 times faster and can definitely bring better results.”
Karam Fattal, Co-Founder, Nova Sport
I definitely enjoyed collaborating with Yan. We launched the app successfully with Zero issues from the back-end side, and thanks to that successful launch, we are now able to go further in the development and continue building on what we have. Building an app is easy, building an app without bugs is a challenge, but building a fully functional back-end that could scale to millions while being cost-efficient is quite an achievement!
Amir Fattal
Co-Founder, Nova Sport
Yan was a key factor for the success of the launch of the app on the technical side. He cared about every detail and took his time to understand each task, thanks to him we made better decisions that made us stay on the budget, keep the app safe and go even faster. Yan is passionate about what he does, he took his time to explain to us why certain tools and technologies are fit for our project, which is very interesting for us to learn. We had a very limited budget for launching the app but still, we have chosen Yan to work on the project, why? Because it is simple math, Yan can go 3 times faster and can definitely bring better results.
Karam Fattal
Co-Founder, Nova Sport
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