Dividend Finance
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Today, Dividend Finance is a leading national provider of renewable energy and energy-efficient financing solutions to property owners.
But in 2014, it was a startup trying to get its digital platform off the ground. It had started building an original product using a team of traditional software developers. However, after 6 months of development, Dividend had spent much of its budget and still didn't have a viable product.
Feeling the pressure from burning a lot of time and cash on a solution that wasn't working, Dividend changed course. It partnered with Airdev to launch a minimum viable product (MVP) of the platform using the no-code tool Bubble – in just 6 weeks.
The results?
- Billions of dollars of loans have now been processed through the app
- Tens of thousands of reps interact with the system every day
- Hundreds of millions of dollars in equity financing have been raised
The OBJEctive
Dividend needed to get a working platform up and running fast to successfully run its business. This meant serving multiple stakeholders, such as borrowers, solar installers, investors, and internal employees, with a platform that could do the following:
- Perform credit checks on potential borrowers and provide decision logic
- Generate complex, custom proposals for borrowers based on variety of personalized factors
- Integrate tightly with Salesforce
- Populate and calculate new data at each step of a project
- Integrate with meter providers to track the amount of solar energy generated by the installed solar panels
- Track loan repayment history
Unfortunately, its traditionally coded app was not yet close to meeting these requirements in the required timeframe.
The SOLUTION
Unable to continue investing significant time and money indefinitely, Dividend sought a new approach. Its chief technology officer was familiar with the no-code tool Bubble and suggested it as an alternative route to get their MVP live. Feeling the pressure, Dividend decided to give this more unconventional option a shot.
Their team didn’t have any Bubble experts on staff, so they hired Airdev to do the initial product build.
“Without Airdev, we wouldn’t have been able to develop that core product nearly as quickly as we have. We went within the course of only a few months from an idea with no platform at all to having dozens of contractors who were actually working and utilizing our platform.” - Phil Meachin
Airdev’s Approach
With an understanding that Dividend needed a working product with complex functionality fast, Airdev’s development team got started building a fully functional MVP in just 6 weeks.
Airdev worked closely with Dividend to align on the highest-impact features and formalize the project’s scope and designs to hit specific timelines. The goal was to build Dividend a fintech application that it could continue to use and scale beyond the initial build. This was made possible by fully integrating the first version of the application with Salesforce so that Dividend could continue to facilitate key operational functionality, like contract generation and charging customers’ bank accounts.
“Airdev is a great solution for companies who are starting at the very earliest stage, who are trying to come up with a proof of concept…But, [they’re] not just for the brand new ideation and MVP types. Airdev has built a system that’s enabled us to scale as well.” - Phil Meachin
THE RESULT
Since the initial build, the app has grown substantially in size, complexity, and the number of transactions that it supports. Today, the platform has processed billions of dollars in loan volume and serves tens of thousands of users.
By developing with no-code, Dividend was even able to improve its business strategy. It wanted to be known as a company that was super-responsive to its customers’ requests for features. With no-code, it could release new features, sometimes on a weekly basis, because it could move quickly on the development front.
As the company matured, it eventually hired an in-house software development team to build some of the business logic in code. For example, the Bubble application was re-engineered to integrate through API calls with the new, code-based part of the application. In addition, the following complex requirements were added:
- Ability for external stakeholders to plug into the application’s API
- SSO integrations with other system, such as a learning management system (LMS)
- A more robust proposal generation process with more complex configuration options
With Airdev’s help, Dividend Finance was able to build an MVP in one month that evolved and scaled with its own growth and needs.
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