Students: they’re smart, they’re trendy and they’re hungry. They know a good deal when they see one. However, there’s a catch to being loyal to their favorite brands - it depletes their pocket money! They are always trying to balance academics, hobbies, leisure and a social life on a shoestring budget.
Couldn’t there be a way for businesses to attract GenZ to their stores without putting a dent in their pockets?
Remics answers this bugging question with a simple app that offers discounts to young students on the most popular outlets and franchises so that they don’t have to make a choice between craving a cheeseburger and being fashionable!
The Remics app provides an exclusive suite of products to students at prices suitable to them. Be it food, fashion or entertainment, installing the app on your phone gives you complete access to various discounts on brands.
Joining hands with a number of franchises and small-scale businesses in food, fashion and entertainment meant that we had to get the app up and running in the fastest time possible. Offers and discounts are heavily reliant on the time of the year because of their seasonal nature, so going live soon was one of our topmost priorities. Some of these brands are popular haunts for students - Mad Over Donuts, Charcoal Eats, Rebel Foods, etc and easily attract flocks of students to their doorstep.
Being short on time really makes us think on our toes and find a solution that balances efficiency with quality of code. With Remics, time was a challenge because the app was stated to be live in a short amount of time. The goal was to find a tech stack which was battle-tested, easy to adopt and scalable. Our research led us to finalise React Native which makes it possible to run the program on both Android and iOS. We managed to get the app tested and running just in time with React Native - cutting down the development time as well as cost by almost 60%!
Unique problems encourage us at Agnostech to experiment and come up with diverse solutions. One such solution was to go with Hasura in the backend which was still in its Beta stage. Hasura is a GraphQL engine that runs on PostgreSQL and comes with a host of different features like CRUD queries, role-based authentication, event triggers, and support for custom GraphQL queries. Using Hasura was clearly the best decision because its alternative, REST API would have required scores of back and forth between the frontend and backend engineering teams, ultimately increasing the overall development time.
Hosting a number of brands across multiple categories that ensure a fair amount of visibility to all of them requires a dynamic Home Page. It was designed in a way to promote different businesses catering to the students’ tastes and moods based on their location. Adopting Hasura gave us add-on features such as GraphQL queries for all CRUD operations along with the capability to write custom GraphQL queries. With Hasura, requesting dynamic data for the Home Page became convenient and less prone to error.
Remics has some interesting features like Remics-exclusive limited time offers for students which can be saved in the wallet to be used later. A simple Search feature lets students make dedicated searches and make an informed choice about where to spend and how to spend.
