The client

Lucas and Thomas joined forces to launch their first startup Myloka aimed at improving the reputation of establishments welcoming the public by better managing Google reviews.

The initial name Lokal had to be changed for copyright reasons.

The project and needs

For their project, Lucas and Thomas communicated these needs to us:

• Integrate and automatically synchronize data associated with one or more Google accounts
• Manage companies containing establishments (in the Google sense)
• Monitor Google reviews of one or more establishments
• Interact with the authors of the reviews
• Monitor the Google/Google Maps referencing of an establishment (probable relationship with reviews)
• Increase the number of positive Google reviews with targeted emails
• Ultra-fast email templates to customize
• Simple import management from external CRMs (API integration to be considered)
• Manage access to different platform resources for different user roles (2-3 max)

The proposed solution

The webapp format with subscription (Saas) had been identified by the MyLoka team, but there were still design elements to be decided, so Kanso proposed to carry out a product design phase with three workshops and the production of a wireframe and a functional mockup, before moving on to the development phase.

The functional and technical design made it possible to specify the essential blocks to meet the need:

• A dashboard for monitoring Google reviews with different filters (content, date, number of stars, establishments)
• The possibility of creating, editing and monitoring email campaigns. Mailjet already provides the possibility of doing email campaigns with various follow-ups (reception rate, opening, click). The cross-referencing between email sent and Google review left was made via a time frame and dedicated developments (if a review was left less than X minutes after clicking on email Y, then the link between the two is made)
• An import of excel files to manage customer data by establishments
• Simplified email templates, based on Mailjet templates, and allowing to integrate internal variables to the platform such as the name of the establishment and the link to leave a Google review. A simple template editor was developed for the platform via the "slate" library
• The import and synchronization of all establishments (My business) from a Google account. Thus the client is not obliged to recreate his establishments within the platform, he can directly recover the pre-existing information and manage everything from the platform
• Graphs of temporal data: average Google ratings, number of reviews left, Google Maps and Google referencing (number of views, click-through rate, etc) made with the recharts library
• Administration tables of companies, Google account, Google My Business establishment sheets and access rights for different users (3 access levels)

The technical stack and infrastructure

• React/NextJS/Typescript/PostgreSQL with a Rest API (Open API) hosted on the NextJS web server
• A deployment pipeline via Docker, Gitlab CI and AWS CDK (deployment via a simple git push)
• Chakra-UI for generic UI components and styles
• Google services called via the official library ("googleapis")
• Email templates managed via the "slate" library, and all the campaign and model logic left to the third-party service Mailjet

As with most of our projects, we proposed to create a pre-production and production environment that can evolve in parallel. Following Google's inability to provide separate projects for the same GoogleMyBusiness account, the staging/pre-production environment was finally deleted after the final production release to avoid incompatibilities.

The scope of action/The means deployed (duration and team)

The design phase involved 2 FTEs over a period of 4-5 weeks:

• A product/UX expert for design and ergonomic issues
• A lead dev for technical arbitrations

The realization phase required 3 FTEs over a period of about 10 weeks:

• 0.5 FTE of lead dev
• 2 FTE full-stack devs
• 0.5 FTE of product/UX expert

The impact