Cross-Platform Messaging

Since both Guild founders have a long track record as entrepreneurs, we knew they needed a smart solution to the problem they were trying to solve so they could obtain business value quickly, along with quality code.

First of all, we had to decide on a tech stack for Guild. They needed a fast, intuitive app, which delivered unique value. Cross-platform solutions seemed a viable option due to the great balance between performance and cost. And user experience is critical if you’re competing with giants in the messaging field like WhatsApp.

Given that Guild is a messaging application, performance is crucial for its success. Node works well for this type of product and due to its async I/O, it is capable of handling a great deal of concurrent requests. We also decided to use Apollo and GraphQL and handle real-time events through the Ably platform. This setup helps us handle real-time parts and offline support. On the other hand, we wanted to achieve the same seamless experience across different devices. Going with React Native and React XP was a great balance between performance and cost.

The team uses Slack, Jira, and works in weekly sprints. Every six months they organize physical meetups to discuss features, prioritize the backlog, and simply hang out.

One unique aspect of the collaboration was in recurring meetings called "deep dives," a collaborative space for the client, product designer, and development team to focus on exploring and discussing 2-3 features that required a closer look from different angles. These meetings were instrumental in achieving goals such as the notification system redesign and can be a valuable tool for any complex design challenge.

With the right tech stack in the right hands, our code for mobile versions of the app is now shared in around 99%. That is an amazing score that never felt achievable. For the Web version, we managed to reuse around 80% of our JS, which was still above Ashley and Matt’s expectations. All in all, using Node.js and React Native brought us a significant difference in terms of time and cost.

The app was first released to beta testers in July 2018 and four months later we released the app to app stores with all the features we planned at the first release. The Guild team kicked off this year with a bang, raising $1.2M (£880.000) in seed funding for further development and growing sales. Since then, Guild has been recognized by Red Herring's 2019 Top 100 European Startups.