DEVELOPMENT & IMPLEMENTATION

First step was to create detailed wireframes which Rep’d’s designer provided. Then our development team analyzed each task in Jira and wrote the API document and data schema prior to going into code.

Mike and Dave had worked with us on an earlier start-up called Minque, a question and answer platform dedicated to connecting curious minds with educated video answers.

For Minque we had written a custom video player for iOS and uploaded and stored the user-generated videos on AWS while keeping the backend API separate on Heroku for easy control over speed of scaling.

For Rep’d however, the focus was more on performance and on server cost because a wider audience was anticipated from the beginning.

We wrote Rep’d to be lightweight with code preprocessors, instead of using a framework like Angular or React, so that we could deploy code quickly, which is important in a white label platform when new clients are continuously being brought onboard and we need to deploy fast to their sub-domain on Rep’d.

Challenges included a very tight budget, so tight we threw in project management hours at no cost and also additional small features throughout the development. We are shareholders in their company, a position we rarely take with client projects, but Mike and Dave are the nicest customers to work with. They were very patient when our updating on tasks was slow at times, as well as on feature development, while we struggled with resources for the budget - the dev team was essentially a paid team of 1 with a stand-in for emergencies.

To the original scope we added more advanced analytics and a way of viewing them in DataStudio, improving the stats presentation for white label clients. For the DataStudio integration, we created a stats database to connect to each white label clients’ database. This proved challenging because a lot can go wrong with syncing stats across our internal databases and Google Analytics in a straightforward query for DataStudio to read.

We also wrote our own teleprompter mode as a way for Rep’d clients to record themselves in real time on their admin panel. We had an issue with recorded videos being saved in .webm which is not supported by the Safari browser, so we converted .webm videos on the API to .mp4.

We also added a NYC Candidates page, integrating the official government API for locating your voter district and representatives, and added Universal Login, allowing signed-up users to auto-sign in across all other candidate pages on Rep’d.

We’ve since integrated NGP VAN - the largest privately owned voter database and partisan provider of campaign compliance software, used by most Democratic members of Congress, to better analyze grassroots voter trends and data.