Sofan

Sofan, an innovative startup, wanted to create a social co-watching platform for football fans. On the platform, hosts can create events where guests can participate. An event is a football match that guests will watch at the host’s, sharing the pay-tv subscription and having fun together. Most of the time pubs are crowded and the experience of watching sport events there is not optimal: Sofan aims to give the user an alternative to know other fans in the city, and watch the match on a comfortable sofa.

We developed an Angular application for the web platform that uses NgRx as state manager, exploiting Angular libraries to share the whole business logic with a Ionic cross-platform mobile application. We used Firestore as NoSQL database directly connected to the client and the entire Firebase platform exploiting almost all its services. We created a complete serverless platform using Cloud Functions in TypeScript/NodeJS and batch jobs to source sport events and teams. Algolia was adopted to crate the event search experience, leveraging full-text, filtering, geoquery, and facets.

The platform did not disappoint the expectations and the hype that newspapers created during the launch. Thanks to several social media partnerships, Sofan reached more than 10000 registered users in Milan and tens of successful events. During the COVID-19 pandemic we introduced online events, yet the promotion was much less successful. The app is currently online but the number of active users dropped to zero.