Our team based WhatsApp platform has now been live for around 18 months, and took around 9 months to build the initial MVP. To find out more about our collaboration during the build, go live, and subsequent 18 months read on.
The philosophy behind msgboxx was to build the best business collaboration tool around WhatsApp available in the market. We started off the process by taking a good look at the other software platforms available in the market and working out what were the key features that we just had to have, along with those that would be our USP. We started off with a small roadmap to deliver us an MVP. The principle was simple integrate with WhatsApp to be able to send and receive standard messages and templates through WhatsApp to end users, and then provide a simple UI allowing our users to interact with the those users and see a nice structured outlook style list of conversations.
Once we had the initial MVP up and running we started running weekly sprints allowing us to ensure our prioritisation was always current and continue to build out new features whilst regularly demoing the product to the sales and marketing teams who in turn were doing live demos with potential clients to get their views on how the platform worked and to identify key features they would want before they would purchase which quickly got added onto the roadmap. The first client signed a purchase order much earlier than we expected and far before we thought the platform features were good enough.
Getting the first paying client was a major milestone in a new business and whilst we were demonstrating the platform to very small estate agents we knew the bigger customers would need a lot more features. We continued to keep talking to potential customers, doing demonstrations, updating the roadmap and delivering on new features until we believed it was good enough to properly launch.
Since launch the client base has been growing and we have been selling into many vertical markets including Estate Agents, Recruitment, Hotels, Solicitors, Dentists, Travel providers amongst many others. We continue to deliver new features on a weekly basis and the platform has grown exponetially. Its been fantastic watching all the metrics for number of organisations, users, messages sent continue to grow rapidly which has brought some interesting challenges.
Scalability has been a key challenge for us as the platform is a real-time chat platform, enabling tens of thousands of concurrent users staying connected to the platform all day long has been difficult. Our key technology stack includes NodeJS serverlesss functions providing an API to our clients, a ReactJS web client, and a ReactNative mobile client, along with a GraphQL layer wrapped around a postgreSQL database. We started off using GraphQL subscriptions to provide a real-time view of the data, but we quickly realised thaty we were scaling up the database platform far quicker than we would have liked to support the growing users. After a number of months we migrated away from subscriptions and moved to a pub/sub model where the backend pushes messages over a websocket connection when the state changes. This one simple change has had a massive impact of our cost and scalability and allows us to continue to onboard thousands of new customers monthly.
Whilst we continue to deliver changes almost daily to the platform, in the 18 months we have been live we have a 100% uptime record and continue to delight our users. To find out how we could help you deliver some awesome technology why not contact us, pick up the phone or drop us an email.