Brizeo
An interest-based social app re-engineered from Parse to Firebase, with chat, swipes, smart filters and content moderation.
About the project
Brizeo is a platform that allows users to get in touch with new people based on their shared interests or experiences. We reinvented the app to make it more user-friendly and robust and to mitigate existing issues that hampered the project’s growth.
The challenge
The project faced several issues. Technical — the service used the outdated Parse platform and had to move to a new one in a very short time. Financial — the project had no investors, so they were limited in resources to develop a new app. Customer acquisition — Brizeo struggled to attract new users as it lacked some essential features. Quality — the previous application was very poor-quality, while images and videos at its core took up a lot of storage. Security — since people could post anything on their own, Brizeo had to filter inappropriate content.
The solution
For quality reasons, we developed 90% of the app from scratch and used Firebase as a substitute for Parse. To attract more users to the app, we implemented a series of features, including chat, tinder-like swipes, and filters by location, age, education, nationality. To achieve the best quality and save memory, we added a compression mechanism for media. For security reasons, we implemented reporting of inappropriate content for further moderation.
- Define the problem
- Gathering requirements
- Design
- Development
- Release & Support
The result
We managed to mitigate the existing problems while keeping to the limited budgets. The new app became a lot more user-friendly, resulting in an inflow of new users, especially among students. At the moment, Brizeo is enjoying stable growth and negotiating terms with several investors.
“We have been working with Define Solutions for approximately nine months. The company was put in a challenging position initially because they inherited a legacy code that was of poor quality, essentially undocumented, and the overall architecture was in disarray. Define Solutions effectively re-wrote everything from scratch. Besides, Define Solutions offered an expert to become our acting Project Manager to advise us on a range of implementation issues until we eventually hired a new backend developer. Define Solutions ensured seamless transition working with new personnel. I believe that the end results speak for themselves. The app is fairly complicated with 45 APIs that must sync with the front-end interface. Define Solutions continues to come up with further advancements and advise us accordingly with best practices from both UI and UX perspectives. I value their commitment and communication, which includes working across different time zones and on weekends. As we continue to iterate and grow, I look forward to continuing our relationship.”
