New projects are always fun, especially when it means for us to really dive into a market vertical. Our goal was clear: designing and developing easy-to-use mobile apps for influencers and ecosystem for the hi! team and advertisers to run campaigns fast and efficiently.

The key to high-scale products is to understand the market, technical requirements, and the users internally as well as externally early on. Especially the design process and defining the backend architecture were crucial to get right, but luckily we had a great onboarding workshop and the amazing team at medialabel bringing us up to speed.

The hi! ecosystem is more than a mobile app for influencers though. It's an extensive marketing ecosystem consisting of Influencer Apps for iOS, Android, and Web as well as an Admin App / CMS to maintain and create campaigns and an Advertiser App to enable brands to check their campaign performance.

The data load is bigger than yo mama. But for real, we are talking about millions and millions of clicks and conversions and related data tracked, aggregated, requested, and served – almost in real time. With multiple services and tracking networks communicating with each other, we needed to explore every option to reduce loads, speed up requests, and make sure data is not only tracked but also displayed as fast as possible. A dynamic cloud architecture using a good mix of queues, workers, relational and non-relational databases helped us keep operational costs down while being able to easily scale up based on usage without compromising on performance.