Prep - University Companion

Since we are using react-native, we have always had web support since the beginning. It's just that react-native as a service was not stable enough, especially the navigation side of things. But, we definitely have had our custom sugaring to make things work in house. Then, the react-navigation finally did a lovely announcement that they have made just enough things for us to have Prep in production.

While hey.com could overcome their situation, we could not cope up with the pressure and had to adjust. Let's see if things change with time.

Also, the juicy stuff is the messaging feature to match with potential friends, who are likely to apply for the same universities as you. No more looking to finding a study partner. The feature will only be activated after you are opt-in for the service from the Message Tab.

Also, you can make your own study groups and talk with them, learn from them, and learn with them. And yes, we have not forgotten, you can un-match with any friend or group anytime 🙍‍♂️.

Web-App: surferprep.com

The main problem with the app is people have to download it and then actually open to just try and get the taste of it. The system is built on Prep in such a way that a single codebase can be supported in all the Platform, however, there are some native packages being used, which do not have the support yet.

So, the work on it has been continuous and when we launch the web-app we launch the messaging feature with it.

HubSpot offers marketing, sales, and customer service, but I needed it just for having a medium to talk to the users you have checked the landing page currently. You can check it out on the bottom right of your screen.

👋 Come and say hi! We'd love to talk to you.

Since the beginning, Prep had been maintaining two states, which was a big overhead. So, a direct cache interaction was introduced with the offline-first approach in the system. Which resulted in:
⁍ 🐎 20% Performace increase
⁍ 📈 5-9% faster data retrieval
⁍ 📉 -9.91% decrement on the bundle size
Blog: https://prep.surf/blog/drop-authentication-add-immutability

The messaging feature was one the complex thing to build, as it needs a new space in the architecture, also Publisher/Subscriber to send data to respective user when message is sent, and continuos data updates and push notification.

Also, Chat needed to be monitored, so Admin controls were introduced to have some kind of guidance of rules

It was definitely taken a longer time than anticipated to onboard the authentic users (the ones who logged in anonymously is not taken into consideration). The new approach and small rebranding did help Prep attain interest in the product.

Small Tip, always hire someone to work on the content, it is the most valuable asset, right content to right SEO is always the best way to go.

The best approach to keep user engaged is to give them away to interact with other humans. So, what could be better than making friends online, chatting with them and building rooms for study groups?
This was a wild diversion from my original plan of working on the Match Tab to act on it but decided to work on this feature so the people give getting a notification and trying the application more than.

Since I had been forcing users to authentication before trying the app, it violated one of Apple's guidelines. Also, Apple had stopped allowing us to use our custom Trial scenario.

This made me think a lot, I'd planned a rebranding in 6 months because the product tanked on the launch , so, I decided to do it early and started making changes on the content, dropped the authentication process and who Trial period.
The plans followed the same:
⁍ Free + Ads
⁍ Monthly Subscription
Pattern but without Trial and you are never asked to subscribe unless you want to subscribe

By now, I'd actively started participated in Pioneer Calls and also engaged directly with the users on the beta program. The more awkward conversation you have now the better product it is going to be, so I started looking at all the negative feedbacks and started making new Pipelines to work on it

Yup, it has taken a long time and I honestly was widely occupied with the current Pipeline. So, I took aside a 2 days time and worked not the landing page. Also, it needed ASAP even to connect with customers. So, it came with Blogs as well

🕸 Landing: https://prep.surf/blog/new-landing-page