Client

Based in Germany, the customer is a provider of specialized recruitment and onboarding software to enterprises and SMEs. Established in 2015, the organization sees its goal in helping businesses find and recruit the best candidates, as well as improve communications with employees.

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to impose lockdowns and social distancing to protect people from getting infected. As a consequence, organizations globally had to set up remote workflows using online collaboration tools.
Additionally, the majority of industries were suffering from an economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus outbreak. To reduce labor costs and ensure business continuity, many firms and institutions turned to freelancers for task and project outsourcing.
Recognizing that the demand for remote services would continue to rise, the client partnered with Arateg to build a freelance marketplace platform allowing employers to hire companies and individual experts for task or project execution.

Project goal

The main goal was to make a minimum viable product (MVP) for improving time to market, collecting feedback, and introducing the required features or customizations according to end-user needs.
To allow employers to easily control project progress, the customer wanted to enable in-app communication, time tracking, and task management. In addition, it was important to integrate a payment gateway for carrying out transactions via credit and debit cards, e-wallets, as well as bank directs.

Project duration

3 months

Team

3 frontend developers, 3 backend developers, 2 UI/UX designers, a quality assurance engineer, business analyst, project manager.

Technologies

TypeScript, JavaScript, React, Redux, Redux-Saga, Storybook, SVG, styled-components, Python, Django, NGINX, AWS, Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Elasticsearch, Docker, RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcached, CircleCI, Firebase, Twilio, PostgreSQL, Braintree API, Jira REST API.

Solution

After collecting and analyzing the company’s requirements, we identified the most essential features, chose a technology stack, and outlined a project roadmap. By following Agile best practices, our software engineers were able to deliver new functionality every 2–3 weeks.
Aiming to provide a seamless user experience, our team elaborated an information architecture of a software solution. The content was organized in such a way that users could easily find everything they might need.
In the course of just 1.5 weeks, our experts implemented a dynamic prototype demonstrating the visual appeal and structure of a freelance marketplace platform. Finally, we created an intuitive user interface, achieved smooth navigation and design responsiveness.
By setting up a continuous integration (CI) / continuous delivery (CD) pipeline, our engineers automated the marketplace development process. For this purpose, we utilized CircleCI. Thanks to CI/CD, we ensured stability and regularity of the release cycle.
In order to enable time tracking and task management, our engineers recommended integrating Jira, an enterprise application with an intuitive interface and rich functionality.
Braintree was chosen due to a multitude of supported payment options, currencies, and countries. Employing APIs, we did not have to build these features from scratch, which also contributed to improved time to market.

During the project, our team solved the following challenges:

  1. Since the client aimed to target worldwide markets in the future, it was crucial to ensure scalability and high availability.
    Our engineers built complex system features as a set of microservices, loosely coupled services that can be deployed and maintained independently. As a result, if some functionality failed to perform, for instance, during heavy loads, a freelance marketplace platform would continue successfully serving users from any part of the globe.
    To improve scalability and availability during website updates, our team suggested microservices containerization using Amazon Elastic Container Service. With a microservices architecture, we also ensured ease of solution maintenance. Employing Elastic Load Balancing, our developers enabled autoscaling of computing resources.
  2. It was important to provide employers and freelancers to communicate via a marketplace website.
    Making use of Firebase, our marketplace developers incorporated private and group chats while enabling sharing of file and media assets (documents, images, etc.). To provide audio communication, we used Twilio, a cloud communication platform as a service.
  3. As an online freelance marketplace would operate with sensitive information (e.g., user personal data, documents, agreements), data security was a top priority.
    With the view of safeguarding sensitive information, our software experts set up two-factor authentication and role-based data access control. In order to further enforce security, we implemented data encryption. By conducting security testing, our quality assurance engineers identified existing breaches and prevented potential issues in the future.

Features

Our team developed an online freelance marketplace MVP that enables employers to hire experts from all over the world for task or project outsourcing. The system includes the following features:
  1. Registration and authorization
  2. Profiles of employers and service vendors
  3. Search by multiple filters such as budget, delivery date and time, job publication date, service options, seller details
  4. Job listing
  5. Bidding mechanism
  6. Private and group chats
  7. Audio communication
  8. Review and ratings
  9. Online payments via PayPal, credit and debit cards, bank directs, etc.
  10. Third-party integrations: Braintree (payment gateway), Jira (time tracking and task management)

Result

Cooperating with Arateg, the customer was able to build a freelance marketplace MVP in just 3 months. Thanks to a microservices architecture and AWS technology stack, the organization achieved scalability and high availability.
At the moment, we provide post-launch system support and maintenance, introducing the necessary features according to end-user feedback.

What our client says

client review, from CEO & founder of a german tech company
Founder & CEO, German tech company

In just 3 months, Arateg delivered an MVP of a web freelance marketplace. After collecting and analyzing our requirements, the team created a dynamic prototype that showcased the visual appeal and structure of a web app. The communication was so effective and pleasant. In most cases, we got responses from the experts within less than an hour. Arateg is a great partner to build complex solutions within timeframes and budget.

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