Challenge
The holiday season was shaping up to be no joke for a web company famous for making people laugh. JibJab—home to some of the web’s funniest political parodies—had created a new product that enabled customers to insert pictures of themselves as JibJab characters in electronic greeting cards. And they’d invested considerable time and money in a library of holiday content.
There was one major problem. Six weeks before Christmas, the new service still wasn’t integrated into JibJab’s monetization system, so they couldn’t get paid. That put the biggest selling season at risk.
To make matters more complex, JibJab’s existing products, Sendables and Starring You, had been built differently. Sendables—which lets customers send JibJab videos as greeting cards—included enterprise-class systems for functions like content management, publishing, administration, payments, communication, and posting.
Meanwhile, Starring You, which allows customers to insert photos of themselves in JibJab videos, had been built without these needs in mind, says Phillip Morelock, JibJab’s Chief Technology Officer.
With all this on the table and just weeks to go, JibJab turned to Universal Mind, based on the company’s expertise in Flex, Adobe’s technology for building rich Internet applications (RIAs).
Process
Universal Mind componentized JibJab’s software architecture into modules JibJab could easily mix and match across products. And rewrote JibJab’s legacy Starring You product from the ground up to integrate it with the systems already built for the Sendables product line.
“We wanted to evolve a product and add components without stripping it down and rebuilding it again,” says Gregg Spiridellis, Cofounder and CEO. “We used to lock our tech team up for a week every time we tried to get an individual piece of content launched.”
Using Flex, Universal Mind quickly re-architected JibJab’s applications as web-enabled enterprise services, so they’re maintainable, extensible and scalable, and lend themselves to extensive code reuse. That also meant JibJab was now using Flash as client runtime, giving users a powerful and consistent user experience across major operating systems and browsers.
“Flex is the technology we should have used when we first built the product,” Spiridellis says. “We have amazing Flash developers but we don’t have the depth of Flex experience we needed. What’s different about Universal Mind is that they build truly enterprise class Flex applications in a tight timeframe.”
Result
Not only did Universal Mind meet the deadline, their work resulted in what turned out to be a record-setting sales season for JibJab.
“Together, we architected, developed and deployed the technology needed to get us to market—and a hugely successful holiday season,” says Spiridellis. “We’re a Series A venture financed business and so proving our ability to monetize to our shareholders was essential.”
What’s more, JibJab’s customers got a better, richer experience. “Doing things in a RIA makes it much more immersive and game-like,” Spiridellis says. “Users can really have fun using the application and that experience ultimately drives them to a good business outcome for us.”
He rates Universal Mind high for how it integrates with clients too. “Their engineers work much more like team members than as pure consultants. They also have the ability to carry on a conversation about product features and usability that makes them unique contributors to a project. They can understand the technical needs and limitations but also have an eye for the user experience and the way that a product should work from a business perspective.”
“What was truly special about the experience working with UM,” says Phillip, “was their ability to grasp the task at hand quickly and comprehensively, and work hand-in-hand with our team to make our launch date for the integrated Starring You product.”
“Working with Universal Mind was the best experience we’ve had at JibJab working with an outside technology firm,” concludes Spiridellis. “I would highly recommend them.”
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