Rebuilding and Improving anEnvironmental SaaS PlatformTackling Saving the World

Who is One Tribe?

The mission of One Tribe is to safeguard forests and biodiversity by investing in communities where indigenous people and small farmers play a key role in land management. By channeling money toward high-quality accredited and validated carbon offset and conservation-focused initiatives, they make it possible for multinational corporations to fund biodiversity protection as part of their ESG campaigns, carbon offset strategy, and Net-Zero journey.

The One Tribe network allows customers to connect their online shops and make recurring donations to causes like rainforest preservation and carbon offsetting.

What did they need from Antler?

Our team was tasked with updating One Tribe's platform to improve user experience and drive environmental impact. We started by conducting an extensive review of the platform to identify the issues, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.

What we found was that One Tribe’s existing platform had been an MVP at best, there tech team was burnt out and struggling under the weight of fighting fires with bugs that they couldn’t find the time or the focus to improve the architecture and solve the root causes of issues. In order to improve their platform and cater to their expanding user base, they needed architectural direction and a strategic rebuild of the core functionality.

1. The first problem was that their platform was very complex since it combined public-facing APIs with internal APIs. The team spent a lot of time testing and debugging the platform after each new feature was implemented to make sure it was all functioning properly. This made it difficult to meet the needs of their rapidly expanding customer base.
2. The second issue was that it was difficult for a small team to administer and maintain the platform because different parts of the business were using different technologies. The platform's growth brought with it an increase in complexity, and the team had trouble keeping up with all the new technologies and tools being introduced. As a result, there was confusion about who was responsible for what and there were unnecessary duplications of effort.
3. Finally, the platform was not stable or scalable, which resulted in subpar functionality during times of high demand. One Tribe ran into serious challenges as a result of this issue, which negatively affected user experience and resulted in lost revenue. The platform's inability to scale to meet rising demand led to diminished performance and longer wait times for users. When One Tribe sought to grow their user base and their environmental effect, this was a major worry. Our group responded to these issues by offering architectural advice and improvements to enhance the reliability, scalability, and usability of the platform.

Platform refactor

Our review revealed that One Tribe was using NextJS to handle client interactions but was 4-5 versions behind the latest update. We updated the app to leverage NextJS features such as static page generation, incremental static updates, and the backend API to proxy requests securely. This update helped to reduce the number of server requests required, improving performance and response times for users.

We also removed reliance on external Google Cloud functions, leaving it to handle webhook requests from customers and respective integrations. This change helped to reduce complexity and improve the platform's stability. By separating the client facing app from the public facing API we significantly improved the cadence that the platform could be deployed at.

This was further supported by the introduction of a staging environment, this stopped the team from having to deploy to product every time there was a new update and could include larger parts of the One Tribe team in testing the new features and platform improvements.

New features

Once we stabilised the system, we focused on enhancing the onboarding experience. We collaborated with One Tribe's designer to optimise the user onboarding process. We developed a tailored onboarding experience based on the customer's product interests, opening a new market segment for One Tribe beyond their eCommerce customers. This new onboarding experience led to an increased conversion rate and greater engagement with the platform.

We also refined their brand pages (company pages that give details on the environmental impact of the brands) these were using an cumbersome Wordpress process previously, we modernised this and created a separate NextJs app that allowed us to improve the speed and mobile responsiveness of the brand pages. But most importantly, using incremental static regeneration show changes the users made on the platform on the pages.

The end result

The finished product was a revamped platform with an enhanced user interface. Significant enhancements were made to the platform's performance, including faster load times, significant improvements in stability, and enhanced scalability. The internal team at One Tribe was also able to save time and effort thanks to the simplified architecture of the newly updated platform. Furthermore, the improved onboarding experience decreased the amount of people who abandoned the sign-up process and increased the number of people who upgraded their plans.

With further plans to grow the business and take their product offering to the next level, One Tribe engaged Antler Digital to work in house and handle all their technical requirements. We're now responsible for the planning, development, and upkeep of their technical product. Working closely with stakeholders to implement and guide decisions on new products, features and continue to improve the underlying architecture of the platform.