Once upon a time, two founders encountered a problem, and they solve it. Clément & Augustin wanted to invest in an apartment in Paris: a real pain trial. You need to be available 24/7, to check on every website the new property advertisement, to be the first on the deal, to be the first to sign it.
They had to find a solution and help future buyers. And then comes the idea of a chatbot in messenger. Thanks to this simple feature, first users were able to enter their criteria: budget, location, number of rooms, etc. Then they receive in real-time tailor-made suggestions. As in every good startup story, the beginning is not that simple. Behind this chatbot on messenger was hidden founders, doing everything by manually, without any automation, picking the right data via Google searches.
The end of Manually Scrapping
Then came the time to hire a real tech expert, Julien Pouillard, actual CTO at Folhomee. When Julien arrived two years ago, he had to automate the entire process. The first things were to implement a database to record every data correctly. Secondly, to develop a search system to pick data and criteria from each advertisement on properties websites. Lastly, Julien had to set up the matching between user needs and on-line ads to create a real virtual property hunter. They use machine learning to favor easy user matching, widening the selection with optional criteria. Now they can analyze vast volumes of data, and use it to extend the matching with variables.
Since Julien joined Folhomee, the company use Clever Cloud as a hosting provider. After having tested several alternatives like Heroku and AWS, Julien heard about Clever Cloud. For many years, he uses Clever Cloud for professional projects.
"For me, Clever Cloud is the simplest, fastest, and the most efficient platform for Startups."
Folhomee uses Clever Cloud to run their apps, to see metrics and logs, for their Databases with MongoDB or Redis for all the add-on part. They have several instances per app: it's interesting to see the log overlapping.
"It's easy to contact the support; I can reach them anytime, and it always went well!"
Julien is the only one who handles the infrastructure part, and recently another collaborator; Maxime Amore, student apprentice, has deployed another application and a database on it:
“For Maxime first use of the platform, I gave him access to the entire Folhomee infrastructure. He could discover logs and carry out maintenance on the applications. Then when we needed a new instance, he was in charge of creating the app and the database. This initation was swift and easy.”
Now Maxime is using Clever Cloud for personal projects and master Clever Cloud platform.
Julien, how would you pitch Clever Cloud?
Clever Cloud is the application deployment platform that allows for continuous deployment with the implementation of databases or other add-on.
Thank you, Julien, for your time and much success to Folhomee!