Project goals

Startup Geeks, besides being the biggest startup community in Italy, is a platform that offers a path for validating business ideas with the aim of giving startuppers practical tools to understand the potential of their new company on the market.

Startup Geeks was experiencing a time of growth, offering always more and more contents. Users part of the community were growing at an exponential rate.

When Startup Geeks got in touch with Mabiloft they felt the need of a platform that could support their growth and at the same time improve the service they were offering to their users.

The main goal was to improve startuppers’ user experience on their platform and simplify community management.

What we have done

Software Architecture

Backend Infrastructure

UX & UI Design

The macro activities in which we have ventured into this project

Communication behind a great design

Good design is crucial for a project. Total transparency between customers and designers is vital for it to be successful, working with a contiuous flow of ideas.

With the Startup Geeks team we tackled the project by dividing it into different tasks, then dealing with them from week to week. We went through several videocalls, talked every day on Slack and wrote comments on comments on Figma.

Our primary goal was getting a better understanding of the project, focusing problems to be faced, suggesting solutions, validating them with the customer and creating a prototype. To study and achieve every section of the platform at his best it was crucial to have every Startup Geeks’ user journey clear!

A scalable infrastructure for a continuous growth

Startup Geeks is growing, and will certainly continue to grow, thus finding itself with more and more users. So how to manage a decidedly not insignificant turnout on the platform? Just one keyword: scalability. The infrastructure architecture of the Startup Geeks platform has been developed in microservices, in order to better manage a certain growth. A microservices infrastructure will be much more efficient than a monolithic architecture, each microservice can in fact be designed, developed, tested and deployed independently.

Organized. Intuitive. Fast.

Startup Geeks users are facing an incredibly delicate and difficult phase for the formation and growth of their business. The path they embark on requires commitment, for this reason it was important to focus on offering them the best possible user experience. The platform had to be organized, intuitive and fast: startuppers needed to worry about their startup, not about the platform!
We studied all the possible user journeys in the best way, designing the platform for all types of users: free users, premium users, coaches, Startup Builder’s users (the twelve-week incubation program offered by Startup Geeks).

Previously, Startup Geeks' contents were available from a section of their site, making it difficult to browse through the hundreds of training videos, helpful articles and documents. Distinguish between the Startup Geeks website and the Startup Geeks platform was the first step to make. All the Startup Geeks material was then cataloged, divided by topics and we created a dedicated player for multimedia content.

Digitize a community

What Startup Geeks offers is a continuous sharing of training materials and contents, which previously were shared through various tools. We have brought together in a single platform the actions that were previously carried out in a dispersed way through emails, google drive folders, excel sheets, calls and external links.

The entire startup’s selection and sorting process during the Startup Builder has also been digitized, allowing admins and mentors to analyze and comment on applications directly from the platform, getting rid of long and inconvenient Excel sheets, shared via email.

Technologies involved

Next.js

Node.js

Docker

PostgreSQL

React

Typescript

These are some of the technologies we are madly in love with, that made this project happen.

The entire Startup Geeks universe held in a web platform.

We created a single point of reference for startuppers, investors and mentors who are part of Startup Geeks, allowing them to share value and power the increasingly active community.