Built a bespoke crowd-promotion service

WYSPR is the world’s first friendvertising and social data collection agency. If you’re wondering what “friendvertising” means, think about the last time you loved a product so much that you shared your sincere feelings with your friends. That way, you were unwittingly friendvertising as well. People from WYSPR had an idea of creating a means of connection between brands and Instagram influencers to empower both parties. For that, they needed a project management portal and an app. However, we had also to overcome a number of unforeseen issues connected to the innovative nature of the project.

Before approaching us, the WYSPR agency was a startup with only an idea of what they wanted to achieve — to provide a modern alternative to influencer marketing. They knew that they needed a mobile app for creatives and a platform that would act as a project management portal for the managers of their agency.

The WYSPR team’s idea was to build a bespoke crowd-promotion service.

How it works:
A brand’s representatives contact the WYSPR agency and describe the idea of how they want to promote their brand on Instagram. WYSPR managers create a request in the project management platform that then gets to be seen by the right creatives. In case they accept the task, they make a post on Instagram or perform another needed action and let the system know. Managers then check the task and in case everything’s OK a creative receives their fee and the WYSPR team makes their profit as an agent.

The distinctive feature of the WYSPR’s business model is that the founders’ aim was to change the world of influencer marketing and build a way to connect brands and creatives with smaller audiences who would authentically promote products and services to their friends and be rewarded according to the actual performance. Hence, the data-driven approach manifested in the way the web platform works.

Our biggest challenge was the innovative idea of the business. Prior to WYSPR, there was no similar app on the Apple Store, so our task was to deal with various obstacles on the way to creating an application that would both be corresponding to the client’s specific vision and meet all the App Store’s requirements on the influencer marketing.

Because of how heavily the business process relies on data, the app project management portal, in its turn, had to become a platform incorporating a multitude of statistical data extracted from the app which then can be used by managers.

After the WYSPR team presented us with their basic idea, we did our research and gave inputs on the project structure based on our experience. For example, we helped to determine exactly what statistics and metrics were of importance to the project.

It immediately became clear that as the project’s distinctiveness was about the close integration with Instagram, the lion’s share or work would be connected with getting various permissions for using Instagram’s business APIs to get all the necessary statistics. Because of gigantic data breaches that Facebook had to face the consequences of in 2018 and 2019, they severely restricted access to the APIs on its family of products, including Instagram, making things tough for vendors.

It allows the WYSPR team to manage every stage of a project internally. The platform was built with Ruby on Rails on the back-end and React on the front-end. These technologies are our main tools used with web development so we are very experienced with them and know where to use them best.

The platform incorporates a large amount of statistical and analytical data and is the major part of the project. We also added extra functions like creating projects, making direct payments, managing contracts, and sending vouchers to the app users.

An app is for creatives to manage their tasks and is connected to the management platform. At first, our team provided the wireframes and built the UI/UX for the WYSPR team to make alterations and approve.

We then proceeded with the app design retaining WYSPR’s brand colors, making it utilitarian, sleek, and elegant.

To make the experience even more rewarding for users, the app’s functionality was expanded with a detailed onboarding, a rating system, statuses, and other additional elements.

In terms of development, we built the app using the Swift programming language which is the primary language for iOS app development today.

Project management platform

Here’s what we used for the full-stack web development of the project management platform:

Front-end
React — a JavaScript library for user interface development. TypeScript — a typed superset of JavaScript that expands its capabilities.

Libraries:
Date-fns, Effector, Final-form, Material-UI, Recharts, Axios, Drafts-js, qs, react-image-crop, Deep-merge, browser-image-resizer.

Back-end
Ruby on Rails. It’s a flexible, cost-effective, fast, and agile programming language and our main tool for the back-end web development.

Libraries:
Shrine, Hexapdf, Paper_trail, Fast_jsonapi, Apnotic, Koala, pdf-forms, Paypal-sdk-rest, Sidekiq.

iOS app

Swift. It’s a fast, safe, and easily-maintainable programming language used for modern iOS app development, that enables a high level of interactivity.

Frameworks and libraries:
FBSDKCoreKit, FBSDKLoginKit, FBSDKShareKit, SwiftyJSON, SDWebImage, CoreData.

Our task was to design an app that would allow its users to have a smooth experience combining beautiful interfaces, simplicity, and easy navigation while the WYSPR team would manage the projects internally with just a handful of people using the project management platform.

The hard launch was in June 2020, and although for the time being, it’s too early to have any substantial results from the marketing perspective (this case study will be supplemented with additional data), according to the WYSPR team, the platform’s efficient and accurate. The native iOS app has a modern design and convenient functionality. WYSPR is currently at a very exciting stage of their journey and we are there to help them along the way.