Lapse is a new social media platform that lets users create groups to take photos wherever they are. These pictures form “rolls” of 36 photos that are then “developed” 24 hours after the roll has started. Users can’t see the photos until 24 hours later - but can continue to chat. Lapse is turning traditional social media on its head - focusing on more meaningful social interactions rather than sharing, endlessly scrolling and promotion of toxic content.
The two founders, Ben and Dan, came to Theodo after reading about the scalability Serverless can bring. An initial consulting mission created an architecture roadmap for their initial MVP and beyond. Scalability was the North Star - supporting an initial 10,000 users in beta testing alone and 150,000 pre-orders before public launch.
How Serverless & Theodo help startups reach success
Startups face two main challenges: funding and scaling sustainability. Serverless architectures allow for rapid growth at low cost by allowing businesses to only pay for what they use. This feature is particularly valuable for platforms with varying usage patterns, for example high spikes on the weekend. Serverless allowed Lapse to move quickly when creating new features, deploying and testing them multiple times per day - all with an engineering team of less than 5 people, supporting huge traffic scaling.
Our approach
Following the initial architecture consulting, Theodo supported Lapse in building an initial MVP by delivering the Event-Driven Serverless architecture to secure their next funding round by supporting a large scale beta launch. Theodo provided the end-to-end tech enablement to support Lapse in building and then scaling their application for public launch.
Following the successful launch, Theodo supported Lapse in hiring and training their own tech team - while continuing to provide expert guidance and additional capacity.
Serverless allowed us to scale to be number 1 in the App Store in the UK & USA. Without Serverless and the aleios team this simply could not have happened.
