Tagboard’s small team wanted to focus on building their app. They needed to find a fast database solution that fit their needs and their start up culture.
Tagboard launched in 2011 with a steadfast mission to bring communities together through social media, quickly and easily. Back then, MySQL wasn’t scaling the way Tagboard needed it to. Tagboard was a small startup team and in the genesis of adding customers so they didn’t have the resources to do it themselves. Their only option was to find a partner who could help them with their data challenges.
“During the first year of Tagboard, our core challenge was creating something that didn’t exist yet. We were creating a new industry — Social Display,” recalled Jordan Larrigan, CTO of Tagboard. “We had to focus on creating something new, something amazing that would wow potential customers enough to want to use us.”
“We were a small team of people who didn’t have the time or resources to focus on building an entire data warehouse solution for ourselves.” Larrigan contacted ObjectRocket to spin up an instance of MongoDB in 2012. No one could predict the scale at which Tagboard would grow.
“The ObjectRocket team helped us choose the right MongoDB environment and data structure for basic scale,” said Larrigan. “A year went by and then all of a sudden we started hitting performance issues. We were pulling in hundreds of millions of social posts. The ObjectRocket team reached out to us before we realized an issue was occurring and helped us scale up without any impact to our customers.”
ObjectRocket continually helps Tagboard increase innovation and performance. By moving some processes to MongoDB, and later to Elasticsearch, on top of managing instances for them, the Tagboard team’s sole focus is on developing new features that allow them to succeed in new markets. Any time Tagboard wants to test something new or try a new configuration on an instance, ObjectRocket comes through for them. They never have to worry about getting charged for something that might not work or the backend tasks of setting the test up or even upgrading instances to the latest version. “Just being able to say, we’re just going to spin up this new instance. We’ll worry about billing later if it actually works. And if it doesn’t, well, at least we tried, right? You can’t get that anywhere else.”
Customer’s Business:
Tagboard is the world’s premier social search and display platform. Used globally by thousands of brands, sporting teams, and media companies, Tagboard is the easiest way to discover social media and quickly share it to connect audiences across websites, mobile apps, large-format displays, and live broadcasts.
Challenge:
Tagboard’s small team wanted to focus on building the front end of their app and microservices. With minimal initial funding and a MySQL database that wasn’t scaling to keep up with their growth, they needed to find a faster database solution supported by experts that fit their startup culture.
Solution:
• ObjectRocket for MongoDB®
• ObjectRocket for Elasticsearch®
Outcome:
Tagboard is now able to ingest 1.5 million posts/hour while maintaining search and query performance. With ObjectRocket’s experts watching over their backend data, Tagboard can build new features in days rather than months.
“You just have to find a group that you trust, that knows what they’re doing, and are really good at it. Then you don’t have to worry about it.
ObjectRocket is a part of our team. We could be one company. They’re just the remote office that happens to handle our database stuff.”
Jordan Larrigan, CTO, Tagboard
With the Tagboard Producer app now in full swing, Tagboard continues to delight its media customers with specialized broadcast applications. Tagboard Producer boasts integrated augmented reality features and data visualizations. Tagboard and Twitter recently joined forces to make it easy for users to discover and share content with the launch of Tagboard Discover. The Tagboard team continues to rely on ObjectRocket to manage database services in a flexible, customized, and cost-effective way that will allow the small team to continue innovating and finding solutions for their customers.
