16weeks
from idea to MVP
An invite-only lifestyle community
from idea to MVP
new users within days
sprint cycles
HQ images using Bunny CDN
Los Angeles, US
Product discovery
UX/UI design
Product management
Development
Testing & Analytics
Jaleigh spent countless hours searching through social media, blogs, and other online resources lacking in quality and aesthetics. As a consumer seeking this type of content, it’s overwhelming, and it takes countless hours to sift through what's good. Through her own experience of getting married, traveling, and buying a house, she realized a need for content & creator discovery that was vetted, curated, and community-driven.
The market size of the wedding services industry by revenue in the United States is $70.3 billion as of 2023. Jaleigh understood this problem was extensive by talking to creators and whole communities and that’s where Sudolabs stepped in.
Sudolabs team built an MVP in just 16 weeks. With an initial focus on weddings and plans for expansion, this user-friendly platform offers curated content and connections not found on Pinterest or Instagram, attracting over 3.5k users shortly after launch.
“The Friend Club had an amazing experience working with Sudolabs! Their team quickly understood the product we were trying to build, accurately estimated timelines and budgets, and delivered a great product with little to no bugs. We highly recommend Sudo Labs (and already have to some friends!)”
We were all set to jump on a project and serve both sides: creators who showcase their work and try to find qualified leads, and members seeking vetted, curated, and community-driven content to get inspiration or request creators' services.
Beginning with the Wedding Club, we planned to launch the MVP within 12-16 weeks, followed by rapid expansion into various lifestyle clubs. However, during the initial stages of the Friend Club project, a collaborative effort led to refining the product's vision and outlining a strategic plan.
The number of top-notch U.S. wedding creators queuing for the release was counted in the lower hundreds. Recognizing the significance of a private release for them, we split the MVP into two parts and go with a first private release for creators only after completing the Core User Journey. This ensured creators familiarized themselves with the app before the main release.
During the scoping phase, we prioritized should-haves, defining integral features for our app based on potential impact and user value. This strategic scoping ensured our development focused on crucial elements, paving the way for a streamlined Friend Club app. We delivered the app in 16 weeks, with analytics for progress measurement, feedback collection, and future fundraising and development.
The platform serves as a hub where you can connect with and explore creators spanning various fields, from wedding photographers and florists to bakers and more – an experience not offered by Pinterest or Instagram.
The Friend Club's platform offers users two distinctive tabs: 'creators' and 'inspiration,' providing categorized posts related to themes such as color, season, and design serving. Creators can establish profiles with portfolios and contact info, including an FAQ section and room for member reviews. Onboarding for new creators is a breeze - they create a profile that becomes public after posting at least 30 times.
Members have the option to contact creators with their inquiries, and upon submission, they receive instant notifications. What sets this platform apart is its unique feature that also enables creators to connect with each other.
A creator's post comprises up to 6 photos, with options to add captions, and tags, and mention other collaborating creators from the community. A member can save these posts or make different mood boards. We initially launched with the wedding club and are expanding to interior and events clubs.
Enhancements were made to the search process, rendering it user-friendly. Users now have the convenience of filtering creators by "creator type" or various tags, with plans on the horizon to introduce location- and name-based search options.
With the founders’ strong Instagram presence, we experienced a rapid start with approximately 3.5k users within days of the platform's release.
Our challenge lies in sustaining user engagement. Look at Pinterest, users spend an average of 14 minutes daily on their platform, with five minutes per session. Two weeks post-launch, users devoted 9-10 minutes to The Friend Club platform - an impressive start.
We maintained three working environments:
With an extensive library of over 40,000 high-quality images, (and still growing!) and a core emphasis on visual appeal, we employed the capabilities of Bunny CDN (Bunny Content Delivery Network) for optimized content delivery to end-users. By caching and serving images from the nearest data center, we ensured a smooth user experience.
Furthermore, we proactively fetch photos when users haven’t yet viewed them, guaranteeing faster loading times. Naturally, the web application boasts a mobile-friendly design.
Our agile approach was a game-changer. We adopted 1-week sprint cycles, breaking the project into manageable features to ensure efficient delivery.
Each feature received dedicated attention from a single developer, responsible for both front-end and back-end tasks. This streamlined approach effectively removed unnecessary bottlenecks, enhancing the speed of our feature delivery.
Since we have been fully in charge of the technical side of the project, we decided to go with "battle-tested" technologies we had previous experience with, to make sure we as engineers can use their full potential and focus on delivering high-quality code with blazingly fast delivery.
Typescript
Next.js (React.js)
Tailwind CSS
Headless UI
Chakra UI
Apollo GraphQL Client
Typescript
GraphQL Yoga
PostgreSQL
Prisma
Render
Bunny CDN
AWS S3
Sentry
Sendgrid
Currently, the platform has already been running for a couple of weeks and managed to gain thousands of users and tens of thousands of visitors. Our goal for the next few weeks is to add new communities and features but not to neglect our main goal, performance, and overall user experience because the most important things behind this platform are communities and the people who create them.
Since the beginning of our collaboration with The Friend Club, we had one main goal in mind - to create the MVP of an innovative platform for communities in 12 weeks where performance is crucial for users to keep them engaged with the platform with as smooth an experience as possible. Since we have been fully in charge of the technical side of the project, we decided to go with "battle-tested" technologies we had previous experience with, to make sure we as engineers can use their full potential and focus on delivering high-quality code with blazingly fast delivery.
The core of the platform consists of creators’ portfolios and inspiration feeds full of professionally taken photos, which are used to represent each creator's work and to provide inspiration for other users. Dealing with tens of thousands of high-quality images without major performance drops is not the easiest task, and we tried to relay as much as possible on things like caching and image optimization.
44 Montgomery St, San Francisco, CA 94104
