Before COVID, Fanup had launched a new software platform called Fanup 1.0. The company's CEO and COO reached out to Hatchery for support in resolving a challenging situation. Fanup 1.0 had been built by a firm based in Bozeman, with development outsourced to a team in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, the platform was limited in both capabilities and flexibility, while being costly to maintain and update. The leadership team wanted to grow and innovate without putting excessive strain on the bottom line.

Hatchery jumps in

Our initial objective was to assess the software ecosystem and align it with Fanup's business goals. Within a day, it became clear that we were dealing with "code spaghetti." While the system was stable and capable of scaling, it was inflexible, riddled with bugs, and running in a disorganized network environment. Heroku was being used inefficiently, costing the team thousands each month despite only a handful of active services. We quickly assembled a team to address these issues, and within days recommended a complete rebuild of Fanup from the ground up. Although we were initially reluctant to propose such a drastic step, the severity of the problems made it clear that a new path forward was essential.