Ruby on Rails MVP of a group communication platform
"This was a broad project. They took it in stride and delivered a quality product, taking the extra time to make sure it was done properly."
About crclup
crlcup was a self-funded startup from New York, USA. They provided a simple and powerful way to interact with user groups. It did this by giving an email address (eg. sinaptia@crclup.com) to every group, a chat room for everyone in the group to hang out, and a photo album.
The Challenge
Around mid-2013, around the time when Slack was first released, Mark had the vision of creating a platform for groups to communicate. After having issues with his running team for going out running he realized that a group chat would be good to communicate and that other groups of people would benefit from this as well.
The first challenge was that the MVP should allow their user groups to communicate in real-time and provide a mailing list. This way, users would be able to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously with the tools crclup provided. The second challenge was to complete the MVP in 2 months.
The Solution
The solution consisted of a Ruby on Rails application powered with Faye, a publish-subscribe messaging system, which allowed us to build a reliable real-time messaging platform using WebSockets, a somewhat emerging technology at the time.
The Outcome
The application was completed and online in 2 months as agreed and soon started hosting different user groups that communicated using crclup.com.