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Dedicated team

One-link business platform for experts

How we helped the Noodle team to launch a new product for solopreneurs and shipped an all-in-one business platform within tight deadlines.
Industry
E-commerce
Location
USA
Time frame
October 2021 - November 2022

Tech stack

Back end

TypeScript, Express, Postgres, Hygraph, TypeORM

Front end

TypeScript, Next

Services

Twilio Sendgrid

Payments

Stripe, Routable

Infrastructure

AWS, AWS ECS, Terraform, Terragrunt

Our expertise

Project scope

Noodle founders approached the creation of a new product with a mission to help expert and service entrepreneurs grow their businesses and hired a dedicated development team to build a custom platform. After the pilot launch, they continued enhancing their product based on the received feedback. Our team helped with tech stack optimization, DevOps and Infrastructure configurations, and custom payment system integration, and built all the core functionality. Including live session messaging, engagement widgets for foreign pages, video-content processing, admin panels for vendors, and more.

Noodle

Web development

Back-end development

Cloud engineering & DevOps

Payment system development

Background

With the Noodle platform, entrepreneurs running expert and service businesses received a new approach to building their communities, engaging with customers, and organizing operations. The Noodle founders wanted to address multiple problems solopreneurs face today.

First of all, the Noodle team wanted to help businesses reach audiences organically. Also, they aimed to allow them to build communities and interact with them more effectively, sharing content daily with less overload. Noodle was meant to integrate the functionality of multiple apps online businesses use – starting from social media platforms and text marketing tools to video broadcasting apps and fundraising platforms.

Business & tech challenges

The Co-founder of the Noddle project approached Wise with the request to hire a dedicated development team as he already had positive experience collaborating with Wise Engineering on another project.


At that time, the team on the Noodle side had a product design, some of the functionality already implemented on the web, and wanted to scale their engineering capacities to deliver features to early adopters and test marketing hypotheses faster.

01

Wrongly assembled tech stack

The tech stack our team started with was not adapted for the seamless new product development process. The technologies chosen didn't allow the tech team to deliver instantly and slowed the overall development process.

02

Allowing upload for multiple file types

To engage with their audiences, experts needed the ability to upload both audio and video files of multiple formats. The newly hired team needed to develop the algorithm for their proper upload, conversion, and playback process.

03

Widget integration to different platforms

The engagement widget was planned as a key feature and was aimed to allow experts to add the iFrame to their existing web pages. The integration itself had to be simple, and the widget had to work smoothly across browsers and operating systems.

04

Hypothesis testing & tight deadlines

On the marketing side, the Noodle team had multiple hypotheses they wanted to test to move forward with product development. Continuous delivery was critical as it allowed them to ship features and get user data and feedback instantly.

Wise is my go-to solution for bringing ideas from 0 to 1. They work quickly, know all the tools, and have an incredible team of highly capable engineers. Bringing a product to market is always a challenge, and Wise has helped me do it successfully multiple times with ease and efficiency.

Marcus Garceau
Marcus GarceauCo-founder at Noodle

Work in progress

The team assembled for the project included two front-end and three back-end developers and a DevOps engineer. A project coordinator on the Wise side helped with HR processes and project management. The team had daily syncs and communicated instantly via Slack with the core tech team that included CTO and two engineers on the Noodle side.

The management received daily written reports on daily performance. Besides, monthly performance reviews arranged on the Wise side helped keep the team’s productivity at a high level and maintain effective communication throughout the project.

Tech stack optimization

At first, the dedicated software development team worked with the tech stack that was suggested by the Noodle team. Yet, soon after the start, Wise engineers offered migration from the Gatsby framework to Next on the front end and Express on the back end. As the codebase increased, the current tech stack slowed down the team and did not allow work locally.

The migration ensured the pages were generated dynamically and allowed engineering teams on both sides to work more smoothly, deliver features faster, and introduce product improvements continuously. Besides, when the team faced the records limit and slow performance of the used CMS, they suggested another migration from GraphCMS to Postgres.

tech stack optimization

Video & audio files processing

With Noodle, experts received the ability to broadcast their experiences, upload files to the platform, and share the content with their audiences automatically via the channels they find most suitable – direct message, automated campaign, or email. Because Noddle aimed at audiences from multiple industries, including sports, entertainment, education, and others, the engineering team worked to allow users to upload any format file, including text, audio, and video.

All audio files were converted to MP3 and video – to MP4 via the Transloadit service, added to Vimeo, and became easily accessible for all end-users. Usually, these were large files, and the system processed them smoothly via the TUS protocol. The resumable upload was also added to allow clients to upload files even with an unstable Internet connection. Experts could upload several files simultaneously as well.

video and audio files processing

Website engagement widget

There were two major requirements for the realization of this feature. First of all, it had to duplicate the functionality that was available on the personal expert page on Noodle but in a more concise way. And secondly, it had to be easy to integrate into any place on any web page and work smoothly across browsers and operating systems.

Our team created two types of engagement widgets: a full-screen widget and a smaller pop-up sidebar. Both of them allowed user authorization, direct communication with an expert, changing profile settings, and allowed vendors to sell paid content directly from their web pages that originally didn’t have such functionality.

 website engagement widget development

Payment system integration

Wise engineers also were responsible for integrating the payment system for the Noodle platform. The team developed a fully optimized checkout and purchase flow, both for native Noodle pages and widgets integrated into foreign pages, that worked across 40 countries. Two types of vendors/experts could receive payments via Noodle – those with Stripe accounts and those without. For the latter, the Routable system was used for recurring payouts.

End-users on Noodle could buy both a single digital product or product series, subscribe to content or services, add even 10 cards to their accounts, or use Apple Pay or Google Pay. Vendors could also generate payment links to share with customers and access an intuitive dashboard to track all the payments.

dedicated team for payment system integration

Chat as a service

Seamless direct communication with customers was one of the main missions behind Noodleshop. That is why the Wise team helped to make messaging for the platform robust. Creators were allowed to talk to each customer individually and stay up-to-date with all the conversations they were handling with an easy-to-use dashboard.

The chat with a vendor was created with the ability to include answers with audio, video, or text. One could configure notifications and receive reminders for unanswered messages for a set time, never leaving a customer without a reply.

dedicated development team

Infrastructure development & DevOps

A DevOps engineer from the Wise side joined the project right from the beginning and was responsible for the project's infrastructure and setting up all the DevOps processes.

On the DevOps part, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines were configured for services (front end, API, media) and infrastructure (running IaC to change infrastructure during CI/CD). This helped ensure faster time to market and gave engineers the ability to copy environments quickly, make changes to them and deploy to production as many times as needed per day without downtimes. Most importantly, gave the business ability to test marketing hypotheses, flexibly react to the data received, and roll back if the results were not satisfying.

The project’s infrastructure was migrated from Gatsby Cloud to AWS and was built with the Infrastructure as code approach using Terraform and Terragrunt. This helped create multiple environments easier, faster, and more flexible.

infrastructure development and DevOps

The configuration process included:


  • User role management, access rights for users, and services to certain resources.
  • Preparing AWS VPC and AWS Application Load Balancer to use them with Elastic Container Service (ECS) applications.
  • Performed load testing via AB utility to identify the optimal amount of CPU and memory resources.
  • Configuration of ECS clusters and ECS services to ensure the launch of applications on AWS.
  • Monitoring of certain events, such as the ECS service work errors, and notifications about high CPU or memory usage.
  • Domains and domain zones management via AWS Route53.
  • PostgreSQL database development and management via AWS RDS service.
  • Building and management for several environments such as production, QA, and development.
  • Integrating AWS CloudWatch and AWS ChatBot services to set up rules and instant monitoring and alerting of incidents in Slack.

We brought a product to market in just about two months with Wise. It goes to show how flexible, efficient, and communicative the team is. Noodle wouldn’t be where it is today without the help from our team at Wise.

Marcus Garceau
Marcus GarceauCo-founder at Noodle

Results

Tech part

Updated tech stack that allows the product to scale further without blocking the engineering team.
Improved code quality and smooth work of all 3-d party integrations.
Flexible and fault-tolerant infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines configured.
Custom algorithms for the realization of key product functionality, including iFrame, video and audio content, payments, and more.

Business part

The configured CI and CD pipelines allowed the Noodle team to ship new features and test their marketing hypotheses much faster.
The new functionality helped form a unique value proposition for expert and service entrepreneurs.
Cost optimization for project infrastructure, monitoring, and analytics for data-driven business decisions.

I would absolutely, 100% recommend Wise to anyone in need of development services. Whether you are working on a complex integration, an overhaul of your CI/CD pipeline, or need to build an idea from scratch, Wise has flexible solutions and world-class engineers ready to tackle the challenges.

Marcus Garceau
Marcus GarceauCo-founder at Noodle

Insights for startups

Launching a new product is never easy, and in every case, there are approaches product development teams can learn from. The Noodle team faced their fair share of challenges but coped with them successfully. Here are some handy tips you can use when bringing your big idea to life.

audience

Ask your audience

Ask your audience

The Noodle platform is built for solopreneurs, and when planning their product and while building it the team assembled a focus group and asked for their feedback continuously. This helped to build the functionality that’s really useful.

impact

Make an impact

Make an impact

Impactful businesses are on the rise. The Noodle team decided to help expert online businesses grow and they found lots of supporters in this mission. Some of them became their first clients and directly influenced product development.

test

Test functionality quickly

Test functionality quickly

To introduce product enhancements that are truly useful and help solve the problems of your customers, your team should arrange the development process in a way that helps to deploy changes iteratively, collect feedback, and pivot if necessary.

delegate

Delegate complex development

Delegate complex development

Building an entire in-house development team from scratch is not always a must. You can hire a ready-made dedicated team that has experience in product development in your domain and focus on business-related issues.

delivery

Continuous delivery is important

Continuous delivery is important

Never underestimate the DevOps influence. To ensure the effective work of your developers and the team overall, the DevOps engineer should be enrolled in the project right from the start. This specialist will help significantly reduce your time to market.

Insights for startups

Launching a new product is never easy, and in every case, there are approaches product development teams can learn from. The Noodle team faced their fair share of challenges but coped with them successfully. Here are some handy tips you can use when bringing your big idea to life.

audience

Ask your audience

The Noodle platform is built for solopreneurs, and when planning their product and while building it the team assembled a focus group and asked for their feedback continuously. This helped to build the functionality that’s really useful.
impact

Make an impact

Impactful businesses are on the rise. The Noodle team decided to help expert online businesses grow and they found lots of supporters in this mission. Some of them became their first clients and directly influenced product development.
test

Test functionality quickly

To introduce product enhancements that are truly useful and help solve the problems of your customers, your team should arrange the development process in a way that helps to deploy changes iteratively, collect feedback, and pivot if necessary.
delegate

Delegate complex development

Building an entire in-house development team from scratch is not always a must. You can hire a ready-made dedicated team that has experience in product development in your domain and focus on business-related issues.
delivery

Continuous delivery is important

Never underestimate the DevOps influence. To ensure the effective work of your developers and the team overall, the DevOps engineer should be enrolled in the project right from the start. This specialist will help significantly reduce your time to market.
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