Scaling SaaS from Ireland to whole UK

Leading SaaS platform for doing branch-specific research. A complete toolset of search, discovery & intelligence features. Used by large organizations incl. banks and government agencies (thus name is a secret).

Technology Stack

• PHP/Symfony
• MySQL
• ElasticSearch
• RabbitMQ
• JavaScript
• AngularJS
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Gogole Cloud
• GitLab CI/CD
• PHPUnit
• Cypress
• PHPStan
• Sentry

Challenge

It was already a #1 tool for doing branch-specific research in its country. Scaling to a larger European market was a natural next step on their business journey. The goal was to do it in just 12 months.

A successful launch in a new market required facing a few challenges. First of all, we had to prepare the platform to handle up to 10× more users. At the same time, it had to efficiently operate on a 12× larger database of a quite complex business domain. The database itself wasn't at that time capable of reflecting all the nuances of a broader market.

Last but not least, we had to offer additional search and intelligence features, to make this SaaS stand out in a more competitive market.

Goals

• Scale from 1 country to 12× larger market
• Optimize search performance and usability
• Introduce new intelligence features

Solution

• Launching a SaaS product on a significantly larger market requires its architecture and infrastructure to be both scalable and flexible. It has to be ready to scale quickly when the product gains traction, but also keep the costs of infrastructure low before it happens. Containerization, database separation, adding abstraction to the filesystem or sessionless authentication are just a few examples of many tweaks introduced to enable flexible scaling.
• After removing all scalability obstacles we were able to migrate the platform from a single server to the Google Cloud infrastructure. We also used Kubernetes to automate product deployment, scaling, and management, which reduced necessary infrastructure administration to a bare minimum.
• This SaaS already had a great search & discovery feature beloved by the users. But to compete in a new market it had to be outstanding. That is why together with researchers and the product team we created a new, top-notch one - based on Elasticsearch and inspired by Google's idea of a single search field. Packed with intelligent features like synonym search, typo correction, stemming, smart contextual suggestions... and light-speed fast at the same time. We also used the knowledge of domain experts to create search algorithms that promote more relevant and high-quality search results.
• To stand out in a new market we also introduced a couple of new intelligence features. We also had to redesign and migrate the complete database, from single-country-focused structures to a more universal and flexible model.

Outcomes

Introducing scalable architecture, optimizing performance & migrating to the cloud, enabling a successful launch in a 12 times bigger market. Although SaaS is just starting to gain traction in the new market, it is already prepared to handle over 10 times more users.

The new data model and search algorithms reduced search times by 92% despite the 12× larger database. Additional intelligence features not only helped this SaaS to stand out in a new market but also brought more customers to the original one.

And all of that in just... 9 months.
With no downtime to existing users.

Check out our Kickstarter