Introduction

Doorda is the UK’s leading smart data broker specialising in big data curation.

When Clifford McDowell founded Doorda in 2014, he was in need of a talented technology partner who possessed UI/UX design and full-stack technical capabilities. We entered into a three-year technology partnership until Doorda was able to afford a transition of their technology in-house.

The Problem

In order to build and launch Doorda, Clifford required the following technical resources:

• A web developer who could maintain the existing code
• A NodeJS developer who could build the backend for the new platform
• A frontend developer who could build the UI for the new platform

Our Solution

We began by recruiting one software engineer in India whom we managed on behalf of Doorda. This engineer worked in the Whyable office in Bangalore and was overseen by the Indian management team. The engineer was interviewed by Doorda’s CEO and CTO prior to being assigned the project thereby ensuring they were happy with the quality of their new team member.

As Doorda’s business grew and more demand was placed on the product, we supported the growth by recruiting two senior developers who specialized in developing performant web applications. These two engineers formed the core web application development team of Doorda and they developed the entire suite of Doorda products. In addition to this, we augmented the tech team with a Python developer for data scraping applications as and when required.

Technology

We built the following technology for Doorda:

• Data scraping library built on Python
• API application built on Sequelize, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS tech stack
• API access control infrastructure implemented on 3Scale
• Web application developed on Symfony/PHP framework
• Application infrastructure setup and managed on AWS cloud with
  • AWS EC2 compute instances
  • AWS Cognito for user management
  • AWS VPC for secure access
  • AWS RDS for databases

Results

Since commencing work with us in 2014, Doorda has gone on to raise several rounds of fundraising to the value of circa £500,000, and are working with some of the biggest names in the world data space, including the Lloyds Insurance market and Experian. By partnering with us, Clifford has been able to keep his technical overheads to a minimum; this ensured greater flexibility for his business, removed a significant technical management requirement from his already full plate, and build a better suite of applications.

Project Link

www.doorda.com