Visavis Dating App

The Issue

Visionary entrepreneur Michalis Panayiotou asked Nebula Labs to deliver Visavis App and Marketplace, an iOS mobile app for the dating sector. The app allows users to ‘experience real connection’, as they select a potential date and then book in to a participating venue to meet their date at. Users pay a deposit for each date through Credit Card, Debit Card or Apple Pay, using the Stripe Payment Gateway.

 

Our Solution

The Visavis venue system works on a two-sided marketplace model, where the cloud-based marketplace allows participating venues (primarily in the hospitality industry) to sign up, link their bank account directly via Stripe Connect, and set their availability and costs up through a venue-facing dashboard.

When a date is booked at a participating venue, the venue instantly receives the deposit that the user has paid, directly via Stripe Connect, less the Marketplace Fee - which is the commission charged by Visavis Ventures.

Participating venues on the marketplace are able to set their capacity and availability through a self-serve venue-facing dashboard, designed specifically to allow for high scalability from an operations perspective.

The marketplace fee is calculated dynamically based on the type of venue (for example restaurants may be charged at a different rate to bars and coffee shops), and the fee is charged instantly to Visavis Ventures through Stripe Connect integration.

The native mobile app was released on iOS, written in Swift, and featured a bespoke backend API, which combines the marketplace dashboard for hospitality venues to use and the Stripe Connect Payment Gateway Integration, written in the Python language using the Django framework, with the highly scalable PostgreSQL Database, deployed to the cloud via the Amazon Web Services platform for truly global scalability and transaction throughput.