Galaxy Live launch a custom CRM in 5 weeks with Dittofi

Danny Quick and Nathan McCartney founded Galaxy Live – an online space where fashion sellers can share and sell their personal wardrobe via live video streaming. After raising $10 million in series A funding, their internal tools were struggling to scale, so they rebuilt their internal tools with Dittofi.

Reading time - 6min read

Danny Quick and Nathan McCartney founded Galaxy Live – an online space where fashion sellers can share and sell their personal wardrobe via live video streaming.

The initial Galaxy Live platform and Galaxy’s internal technologies were built using different no-code platforms. This allowed Galaxy Live to rapidly piece together a functional solution that they used to get to market fast, test and validate their concept and then, to ultimately raise money to help scale up their business.

Soon after launch, Galaxy Live raised $10 million from Seed and Alumni Ventures and began to scale their business.

We caught up with CEO Danny Quick to ask him a few questions about what challenges he faced when scaling his no-code technology stack, why he chose Dittofi and how the app development on Dittofi went compared to traditional methods and other no-code platforms.

We wanted to build an online space where fashion sellers can share and sell their personal wardrobe via live video streaming.

Why Galaxy decided to rapidly scale their tech with Dittofi

Danny Quick: As our business started to scale, we realized that the no-code technologies that we had used at the start of the business were not scaling well. In particular the CRM (customer relationship management) technology that we had developed using the no-code tool Airtable became increasingly expensive the more data that we put inside of it. Airtable also slowed down massively the more data we included and it was difficult and in some cases impossible to extend.

What we needed was a custom CRM solution that could pull sales data from disparate data sources and then efficiently search through the data and scale the number of data sources and data points without any limitations.

To achieve our goals, we reviewed a number of out of the box CRM solutions, however none of them quite fit our business model and were very expensive. In the end, and because of these limitations, we decided to go the custom route and build our own custom CRM.

Next, we started to look for a development agency to build us a custom CRM. After visiting several agencies and getting quotes for custom CRMs we realized that building a custom CRM was going to be really expensive and time consuming. This didn’t work for us because (A) the timelines were way too long, we needed a solution yesterday, and (B) we were confident that we could find a lower cost solution.

After some research, we came across Dittofi. Dittofi was the perfect blend of rapid app development and power. The solution offered a visual coding interface, similar to no-code technologies, but with all of the flexibility of building an app with custom code.

Dittofi’s platform provided the speed and the full stack flexibility we needed to build our web app.

The speed and time to market offered for the app development with Dittofi was much faster than was being quoted by traditional coders. After an in depth review of the capabilities, we decided to go forward with the app build on Dittofi.

So you decided to build your app on Dittofi, what happened next?

Danny Quick: We had a team of two engineers and a project manager. Here is how the project timeline looked.

Week 1: On-boarded and trained our team on Dittofi

We started by training some of our internal app developers first. This process took a couple of weeks, while we got familiar with the Dittofi platform – we started by learning how Dittofi’s front-end builder worked.

Week 2: More training and project plan created

In week two we learnt how Dittofi’s back-end builder worked and then translated what we had learnt into a project plan.

Minus the time that it took us to learn Dittofi, it took five weeks to build our CRM and to get it into the hands of our sales team.

Week 3: Actual app development started

After learning the ins and outs of the Dittofi platform, the first line of code was generated by the Dittofi builder in week 3.

Week 4: New features added

At the start of week 4 we reviewed what had been developed and decided to tweak a few of the features before the official launch.

Week 5: Back-end development completed

The back-end of the system was completed first. This included approximately 40,000 lines of computer code that had been generated by the Dittofi platform in just 3 weeks. This is approximately 2,500 lines of code per day (or 4 times faster than we traditionally coded).

Week 6: Front-end development completed

The front-end of the system was completed. This included approximately 50,000 lines of computer code that was generated by Dittofi in just 4 weeks. This is approximately 2,500 lines of code per day (or 4 times faster than we traditionally coded).

Week 7: App completed and launch

Dittofi has an option to launch your app in a single click into a pre-configured AWS environment. So this step ultimately only took about 1 minute.

Are you and your team still using your custom CRM today and do you have any plans for future app development with Dittofi?

Danny Quick: Yes, since our initial release we have added lots of new features and styles to our custom Dittofi CRM. Dittofi has allowed us to build these new features quickly and we have not run into any limitations. We have also accessed all of the code generated by Dittofi, just so that we have it and we know where it all is.

On the hosting side, we have had no downtime or outages and the cost of the hosting has remained entirely stable. We have pumped millions of leads into the database without any slow downs.

We have some plans for future app development, mostly we are just iterating on our CRM solution and integrating this deeper into our business so that we can become more organised, move faster and be more productive in our day to day work.

Solverwp- WordPress Theme and Plugin