Fishing Points is an app that helps fishermen discover fishing spots, save locations, and receive detailed forecasts, including tides, moon phases, marine conditions, and weather reports. With over 10 million users globally, it needed to evolve beyond a mobile-only platform.
The product faced challenges in syncing data across devices, especially when migrating to new phones, leading to potential data loss. The goal was to create a seamless experience by introducing a backend solution, migrating existing user data, and launching a completely new web app.
Highly Scalable AWS Architecture with POC
After a couple of iterations & POCs, we made the decision to build a custom synchronisation engine.
Wireframes & Design for the new Backoffice / CMS system
Finished and aligned V1 designs & feature set for the custom built CMS.
Estimated Roadmap
To align on expectations, timelines, and resources.
Scalable Backend Infrastructure
Introducing a robust backend and database to handle the massive user base and serve as the single source of truth for all user content.
Custom Backoffice
For content and administration management.
Web App
To provide users with a new type of experience in planning & reviewing their fishing expeditions.
14 Million Landing Pages
With real-time forecasts & fishing activity statistics for all cities and waterways in the world - more than 14 million pages.
Data Synchronization
Safeguarding user data by migrating millions of records from individual devices to a centralised database and syncing this data to user’s other devices without disrupting the user experience.
Security Protocols
Data security is key element of infrastructure for the. As combined work of all teams we implemented protocols to safeguard the data and all transfer of data.
Disaster Recovery Scenarios
What will happen with the infrastructure if the AWS Availability Zone is down? We know.
Monitoring & Analytics
Integrating monitoring tools is easy, polishing the metrics, dashboard and alarms based on the ongoing work is the hard bit that we're constantly working on day-to-day.
A huge database of users from all over the world and no previous cloud solution for storing it were the key challenges we were facing. Smooth and accurate migration, stable performance worldwide, and an engaging user experience for the new web app were at the forefront of our goals.
All user content like locations of catches was previously stored directly on the iOS/Android device. We needed to devise a plan of migrating this content to the backend. Because of the large user base, we had to do this on a per user basis.
Users are dispersed over the whole world, so we had to take special care to maintain stable performance of the platform for all geographical locations. The same goes for the large user base, where spikes of traffic can cause serious degradations of service, so we have to monitor, test the performance and optimise the platform constantly.
We wanted the new web app to mirror the mobile app’s functionalities, but we also considered the specifics of the platform and made custom adjustments to ensure optimal performance for the web app as well.
We generated 14 millions of dynamic landing pages, each representing a specific geographical location. These pages offer real-time fishing-related forecasts, pulling data directly from the backend for high accuracy and reliability.
"They are constantly seeking feedback and acting in it, trying to understand what we would like to achieve."
Klemen Klemenčič
CEO, Fishing Points
Looking back at the the story behind the founding team at Fishing Points and the last 3 years of our cooperation, there are a couple of things that really stand out as cornerstones to the success of the product.
This is common advice, but we rarely see someone live by it as much as the FishingPoints founders do. And that’s one of the foundations that helped the product go from a good MVP with an initial user base to long-term sustainable growth.
When every decision is dictated by “how will this affect the users,” this shows in the long run. Some call it PLG - product led growth. We’ve named it user-first mentality. Either way, it’s definitely something that everyone at Fishing Points lives by.
Track all events, collect all the data, make decisions based on user behavior. We’re sure you heard it all before, but going from collecting data to acting on it is a hard step that the Fishing Points team has done and it has helped them build a successful product users love.
It’s easy to talk about respect and trust when things are going smoothly, but sometimes things don’t go in the desired direction (slow progress, bugs, unforeseen changes, learning on the job, you name it!). It’s even more important to look in the same direction then, and think about how to solve problems (instead of assigning blame and feeding on negativity).
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