Dubsmash Switches to Stream from an In-House Solution
About Dubsmash
Dubsmash is a global entertainment platform that allows users to interact with the content they love. Their team is building the interactive video quote database of the future, allowing users around the world to share, lip-sync, and meme over pop culture content. With over 200M global users who create & interact with 35 videos every second, Dubsmash is building the entertainment product of the future — one where consumers are actively participating versus passively consuming.
Challenge
Dubsmash has always been a huge fan of not “reinventing the wheel” by using existing solutions, being that they’re a small team operating very quickly. However, they initially believed that they could build an in-house feed solution that would have all the features and functionality they needed, at a lower price than what they saw in the market. They soon discovered that the complexities of building streams and feeds are vast. While they were able to easily construct a simple chronological feed, they ran into many difficulties when attempting to add features such as ranking and personalization. After spending many weeks and valuable resources on development, they realized that continuing to build in-house would not provide them with the best and most sustainable outcome.
“Building out feed technology is quite a challenge. We made the mistake of trying to build it ourselves…and we were just stuck. From a feature perspective, we couldn’t build something as robust as what Stream can provide. I’m simply amazed at how certain features, such as ranking, work. Stream is also very easy to implement and their team has been responsive on Slack!” — Tim Specht, CTO of Dubsmash
Why Stream
Primary Reasons
* Time to market
* Scalability
* Simple implementation
Dubsmash has been familiar with Stream for over two years. They had experience with the original, open source Stream framework and had gone through the Try-the-API tutorials. They had also done extensive research on The Stream Blog and documentation page. When they reached out to Stream, they were in need of a feature-rich solution that could scale for their expected growth while integrating quickly and easily. Dubsmash was particularly impressed with Stream’s easy-to-use ranking feature, and the fact that the API can cover many use cases. Dubsmash uses several ranking methods side by side. The feed in their admin is strictly stored by time and the feed shown to users takes into account both popularity and time decay. What would have taken weeks of development time to build in-house, took a day and a half to implement with the API. With Stream, they just “don’t need to worry about it!”
Moving forward…
Dubsmash is planning on expanding their offerings with more mobile and web-based products built around their core product — their ‘video quote database’. We can’t wait to see what they come up with!
Originally published at The Stream Blog.
