Notebookrank | Scaling successful startup to the global market

Notebookrank is an AI-driven service that advises on laptop purchases. It reviews thousands of specs, benchmarks and offers to "understand" the industry. Suggest the best laptops for individual user needs.

Technology Stack

• PHP
• Redis
• Angular 9
• TypeScript
• Azure cloud
• GitLab CI/CD
• PHPStan
Sentry

Challenge

Notebookrank was playing an important role in consumer decision-making in Poland, generating millions in revenue for its partners. This was the time to go global and apply a proven business model to multiple countries around the world.

Doing great in a local market, the platform wasn't yet prepared to handle significantly more users. That was our goal - to make it ready for scaling from relatively small Poland to countries like the USA or India. We were also asked to optimize usability and conversion rate, to make Notebookrank competitive in more demanding markets.

Goals

• Scale from a local to a global market
• World-class performance and scalability
• Optimize user experience and conversion

Solution

• To achieve high performance and scalability we added important improvements to the code and platform architecture:
  • Introduced stateless, microservice architecture
  • Migrated compute-heavy AI algorithms to Azure cloud
  • Added multiple cache layers between parts of the platform
  • Delegated all the static content to CDN's
  • Moved the whole UI logic to front-end javascript application
  • Added server-side rendering to keep the UI fast and SEO friendly
• Adding observability and setting up various conversion goals allowed us to A/B test every aspect of the platform. As a result, we implemented multiple tweaks to UI&UX that help new users to Adding observability and setting up various conversion goals allowed us to A/B test every aspect of the platform. As a result, we implemented multiple tweaks to UI&UX that help new users to make their purchase decisions faster.
• The global launch of Notebookrank required also adding internationalization features. Multiple markets, languages and currencies were introduced with both UX and SEO in mind.

Outcomes

New architecture allowed Notebookrank to scale from Poland to multiple countries around the world. Right now they operate also in the UK and India whilst the US and Canadian versions are soon to be launched.

Thanks to performance optimization users get their personalized rankings in less than 35 milliseconds now, and overall page load time was reduced by over 80%. Better page speed & redesigned usability improved the conversion rate by 65% compared to the local version, giving this startup a solid foundation to conquer further markets.

The whole process took approximately 8 months.

Check out our Kickstarter