Skyrocketing subscriptions with clean code

The bright idea

How can you reach out from a few hundred to a few thousand subscribers in a matter of months? Our customer leads the fashion retail ecommerce business in Europe and consequently has many departments in constant growth. In this specific case we worked for a customer loyalty program, which consisted of a subscription model to make faster and cheaper deliveries and other aggregated services.

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Our solution

In early 2019, one of Europe’s leading fashion e-commerce companies reached out to Wunderdog. They were willing to scale their customer loyalty program from Berlin to Europe-wide and they were looking for a software consultant to help them move away from their MVP phase.

Three months later we were leading the project, mentoring the team and refactoring their codebase so it could be supported. We made the feature development time cycle shorter; we made the team switch from Javascript + Flow to TypeScript and simplified the implementation and maintainability of new features, as well as the running of campaigns and A/B tests.

How did we do it? Domain Driven Design (DDD) and TypeScript as resources

Initially, our customer wanted to work with developers with experience with Javascript and React. They used Flow, a Static type checker for JavaScript, by which you can enable users or developers to use types. It’s not as enforced as in TypeScript (much stricter when it comes to types), so we as a team proposed to use TypeScript. Other teams in the company were already using it and it is a good language to work with. Thus we also made a case for switching to TypeScript rather than keep using Javascript + Flow. For the new project after ours ended, everyone in the team started using TypeScript.

The inevitable challenge

It took some months to evidence the main issue was not the size of the team but the foundation of the codebase, which was not clean enough. The main driver for this change was the domain driven development and making sure to deliver a scalable, maintainable and readable code. Once this was addressed, we could start seeing interesting results in numbers: for instance, how the subscribers grew from a few thousand in Berlin to hundreds of thousands Europe-wide. Eventually, we suggested other changes that they implemented successfully. After some months, other developers at Wunderdog joined the project: our customer was fully trusting we knew what kind of developers to hire, and for which occasions.

Success that speaks for itself

Although it’s commonplace, being proactive and repetitive in the messages, speaking out and pointing out the flaws or giving feedback optimizes all sides of a project. There is always room for impacting areas that nobody thought of initially just by being perseverant and resilient. The numbers end up speaking for themselves.