Building the future of online retail
The Challenge
Building a startup from scratch is not easy - especially if you want to do it FAST.
We joined the founders of Pickery shortly before going out to raise capital for their pre-seed round to speed up their product development and prep the team and project for Due-Diligence. Eventually, the team found themselves in talks with Cherry-Ventures and merged Pickery into the newly founded company FLINK.
FLINK took on the challenge to become the market leader while having to run up against a more advanced and established competitor in their German Home-Market. Therefore they were looking to make the right tech-investment choices and scale their product and organization quickly while fully owning the Consumer Tech-Product. Everyone understood that this was the key to future profitability and success.
While building the organization rapidly from scratch, it was clear to the FLINK management that building a functioning tech team in-house will take too much time to scale further.
Scope of Our Work
HUBBLR came in with the need to enable the founder team to go through due diligence. During this phase, we’ve joined Pickery as a small hands-on team to stabilize the product and prepare the team for potential pitfalls during Due-Diligence.
Preparing for due diligence
We took the following actions to bring value to the project immediately:
Stabilize React-App
Stabilize Backend Services to allow more users to use the project
Evaluate Tech-Decisions and Codebase to point out potential issues and define a short-term roadmap for Investor visibility of known challenges and prioritization of them during Due-Diligence
Migrating from a Heroku Server to a Google-Cloud environment
After merging the companies it was clear that scale was inevitable., This allowed us to start leading the product organization together with the former technical Director Saad Saeed towards launching FLINK as a multiple-location Organization in January 2020, together with the former technical Director Saad Saeed.
Scaling Partner and Innovation Hub
During the time until the launch in January, our focus was to:
Join as a fully functioning team to drive early-phase product development
Lead the rapidly hired tech organization around us by establishing tech ceremonies, introducing agile work, and driving focus into the engineering teams.
Refactor and rework the consumer app to
Integrate a more sustainable payment provider for scale
Integrate multi-hub catalog features
Rebuild the user journey
Introduce Growth Marketing Tooling
Introduce User Analytics Tooling
Advice on ERP decision making
Rework the Hub-Tech React-Native Application
Rework Hub-Tech Services for scale
Following the initial go-live phase of FLINK, HUBBLR became a strategic implementation partner for further scale, driving all big-bet projects into the market.
While still scaling Hub-Tech the majority of the HUBBLR Team at FLINK started to focus on the new strategic shift into organic growth, hence started to deliver this consumer product as well. A new team of HUBBLR engineers and other developers led by Cedric was formed to drive a webshop MVP as quickly as possible into the market.
The focus of the Webshop was always to drive customer acquisition with organic traffic as a long-term strategy, therefore we worked closely with the marketing department.
Therefore an SSR-driven web project, focussing on SEO optimization was unavoidable and the solution eventually turned into a Vue project focussing on the initial ramp-up of the project. We decided to expose the full catalog to Search engines with an aggressive organic growth strategy to start establishing the FLINK brand.
The Impact
In total Flink raised 1.2B in funding over the years and we’ve been along for all the major steps.
Together we’ve brought 4 consumer apps alive, developed a Recipe Project and drove a vision for Home & Navigation changes of the future to overall make FLINK more personalized to the shopper's individual needs.
6 month after launching the webshop FLINK experienced a 350% uptick in organic traffic while seeing a 4000% increase in orders that was able to be allocated to organically converted customers which is a major win and proved that focussing in a very competitive market on organic growth strategies between product and marketing teams where the right steps towards longterm success.
Masato Higgs
VP Consumer Product
"HUBBLR supported us in our earliest stage to bring Flink alive. They consulted & actively participated in technical decision making, software development & helped to scale our globally growing team."
Let's Talk about your project
Reach out