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Overview

Smackr was one of the fastest growing projects we have ever been involved with. A real-time chat app for highschool and college communities that started as napkin sketches and went through rapid iterations and upgrades to support the extremely fast growing user base. Hundreds of new users a day from the beginning allowed us to rapidly test what features users responded to and keep the technology infrastructure growing while the client's management was able to focus securing investors for this fast growing app.

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Startups

Everything that is exciting about startups in true form with Smackr: Rapid paced, apps, scaling, investors, communities, uncertainty, experimentation and teamwork.

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Prototyping and Ideation

Rapid prototyping was a critical part of exploring ideas under such fast paced conditions with daily insights into new user needs.

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App Design

App design with Smackr was a very agile and ongoing process. With a rapidly growing user base and ever expanding user needs, the pressure for adaptive and creative solution on user experience and general design was high.

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App Development

Performance was key, and native was the way. Rapidly changing requirements and an agile development process paved the way to successful sprints and milestones.

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Web Development

A complex app server catering uniquely to every school in the country required well thought out architectures, experience, and smart approaches to database development.

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Content Management Systems

Managing the app's content is just the beginning. Velociraster also built a robust custom anti-bullying monitoring system that allowed a team of internal staff track, report, log and act on any bullying behavior to ensure the quality and safety of the community.

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API Development

An intricate API system had to be developed to allow flexibility between app and web systems as well as provide a streamlined point of data transfer to facilitate scaling and agile development needs.

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Hosting and Scaling

With such rapid growth early on, Heroku proved a valuable infrastructure platform to rapidly scale on a broad scale and to adapt to peak times throughout the day without having to divert significant developer time or have devops staffed before it was affordable.

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Team Transition

From the beginning the client's goals were to grow and seek investment as rapidly as possible. Our role was to ensure they had the technical expertise behind them during this critical upstart period. As a result of success, multiple fundraising rounds came and we helped the company transition to offices and in-house staff.

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