Agora Images

Overview

Agora images is the best mobile app in Spain in 2018. It is the first global image community where customers can buy and sell their pictures with no middlemen, and no commissions. It is a photo app installed in Barcelona, that has become an online marketing channel for the photography industry, companies, and brands.

Agora had already developed an iOS prototype of their app to test the market needs. A while after launching the prototype, they were able to confirm that there was a need in the market for that type of product as it was quite successful and had grown to 10.000 users.

Goals

Agora Images was willing to climb up to the next level in terms of traffic volume and performance and to do so, they needed a quick intervention. Apart from having to develop certain features, they needed to develop a stable application due to the fact that the user base was growing.
In July 2018 Agora Images closed 2 million euro financing round. The capital from this round will go towards platform’s improvements and sponsored contests engagement.

technologies used

Android, React.js & Node.js, AWS Lambda, Elasticsearch.

Results

Agora was able to raise 2 rounds of funding and get more than 2 million investment
The team was able to reach the goals regarding time and functionality
Agora has acquired more than 2 million satisfied usersAgora was satisfied with the results and today, we have become their official tech partners to keep collaborating on all the digital product development.

Challenges

Timming – Regarding the timing, there was pressure coming from the marketing department due to the fact that the campaigns had to start, and the rest of the stakeholders were also expecting results. Both the Android app & the web platform had to be launched in less than 3 months. That was quite a short timing for the dimension of the platform & the scope of the project which required more time. Having to build the perfect team with the right set of skills and deliver the project within a short notice was quite challenging!
Security - Generally speaking, payment systems encounter many security problems. And to get the user’s trust, Agora had to ensure security, which was a very important part of the project. Although we used the peer to peer system of payments Stripe, the idea was to be able to register all transactions that happened between the users. This would enable Agora to manage complaints & issues in case errors would happen with the payments.
Reliability & performance – Besides being secure, the payments feature had to be reliable and performing well to be able to handle a large number of users. Needless to say that this is an important part of Agora’s business model. They couldn’t afford an incident with the payment feature and run the risk of having unsatisfied clients that would stop using their platform.As they were dealing with Stripe, it was very important to ensure that the integration with the third party went well, that it would be 100% reliable and that the communication would be highly performant.

What we did

Defined and prioritised the backlog to meet deadlines that were set by the company
Planned the technical strategy and backend architecture together with the Agora team
Closely collaborated with Agora Images software team to develop the Android app: which was necessary to cover the android users market and, consequently, increase the total number of users
Developed the web platform: that was mainly intended to serve all the p2p payments and therefore accomplish the investor’s goals.