A Change Platform

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Case Study

#engineering

A Change Platform

Dough is an online platform giving emphasis to women-owned businesses, and empowering their shoppers to become #WalletActivists. They empower members to shop in women-owned businesses by incentivizing them with savings.

The App's Job

Echobind had the opportunity to help create a membership platform for Dough's paid subscribers. The platform allows paid-members to view discount codes and other member benefits. It also allows Dough admins to curate promo codes and show/hide content from their Instagram feed.

The Problem

One of Dough's major goals was to create a membership platform that integrated data from Squarespace so they could easily manage content and avoid building out a custom CMS. Dough determined early on that Squarespace couldn't meet their needs for paywall and subscription-based membership, but it was vital that their team could add new content easily to both their marketing site and the to-be-built membership platform.

The membership platform needed to allow paid users to access promotional codes from partner sites. Dough members also needed direct access to a concierge via an in-app chat.

Our Solution

Our developers joined Dough as the Engineering department while creating the first version of the Dough platform. We later helped them interview and onboard their first engineering hire.

One of our major goals was to build a cost-effective solution, that would also easily scale with any traffic Dough could throw at it. We knew that Browser extensions and a potential mobile app were on the roadmap for the future, so we prioritized GraphQL for the API layer to make these integrations easier when the time was right.

Using designs provided by Dough, our team leveraged React, Node, GraphQL, and Serverless technologies to develop a stable and cost-effective foundation for the future. Dough's marketing site (built on Squarespace) powers much of the content.

We:

Built a GraphQL API in Node that syncs data from Squarespace every 5 minutes. This ensures stability and performance. Data is persisted to a Postgres database.
Built the frontend in React using Next.js.
Used Emotion as a modern CSS-In-JS approach to style components.
Connected with Smooch to enable Concierge chat/SMS.
Leveraged Stripe for subscription plans and payment processing.
Added Sentry and Amplitude for error and event tracking.
Created an admin tool that allows Dough to control individual promotional codes for brands and products. It also allows admins to show or hide content from an Instagram feed.

Eventually, Dough successfully sold their company to Juniper and they merged their technology and team. We're incredibly proud of the work we did to help the Dough platform succeed.