Challenge: Ajaib wanted to better serve its community of investors by upgrading the platform's in-app UX and messaging functionality. However, the company's existing chat provider was inflexible on pricing, and the existing in-house activity feeds infrastructure was resource-consuming, challenging to maintain, and did not yield the desired user engagement results.
Strategy: Ajaib found Stream and quickly migrated from another chat provider and replaced its in-house build with Stream's Chat and Activity Feeds APIs and SDKs.
Result: Integrating Stream Chat and Activity Feeds has increased Ajaib's user engagement by 30% and reduced its development efforts by 30%. Ajaib can continue to scale confidently without worrying about reliability or budgetary constraints.
About Ajaib
With over one million users, Ajaib is the leading FinTech platform, third-largest brokerage, and the fastest-growing unicorn in Southeast Asia. Users can buy and sell stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds while engaging with a like-minded community of investors. Ajaib has been dedicated to promoting the importance of financial planning and educating users on safe, trusted, and affordable investment strategies since 2018.
The Decision to Build vs. Buy
Ajaib has a team of experienced engineering professionals. However, their time is most valuably spent developing the core competencies of Ajaib and the unique functionalities of the platform. Building chat and activity feeds in-house often delay the progress of a larger product roadmap, and maintenance and iterations only bottleneck things further.
Ajaib Product Manager Ghulam Zaky says, "Ajaib previously had an in-house activity feed structure. However, user engagement was low, and we decided to retire the feature for that reason as well as to redistribute the amount of resources that were required to maintain it."
Ajaib found that users were not leveraging the feed functionality to its full extent, so the product team chose to retire that feature for some time until, "Earlier this year, we had an idea for a new way to leverage feeds. We realized Ajaib could use it to share content and updates with users versus users posting among themselves," Zaky says.
Reimagining the purpose of activity feeds within the platform inspired Ajaib to get a new solution up and running as quickly as possible. Zaky says, "Reviving our existing in-house solution wasn't an option, so we explored 3rd-party integrations and chose Stream since we had a good experience integrating the chat SDK."
Evaluating Chat Providers
Before integrating Stream, Zaky says, "For chat, we previously used Sendbird as a third-party integration because real-time chat is very hard to build in-house. But, the past few months in the tech industry have been hard, and we needed to cut some costs. We tried negotiating our contract with Sendbird, but they couldn't meet our budgetary needs. So, we began exploring alternatives and found Stream, which had very competitive pricing with comparable, if not better than, Sendbird."
Ajaib was looking for a cost reduction and a solution that could scale alongside its growing user base.
Zaky says, "One of the key features we see lacking in Sendbird is their limitation on the number of users within a group. Their maximum group chat capacity is set at only 20K users, and Sendbird has no plan to increase that. Indonesia is a huge country, meaning some chat groups could have well over 20K participants. One of the main reasons we migrated to Stream is because they do not have any scalability limits. We were also to share the good news with our users that groups are no longer limited to 20K participants, and we have seen the user count of many groups surpass 30K participants."
The Ajaib team found Stream's pricing model to be more flexible for their enterprise use case and Stream's support options to better suit their business needs. Luckily, Stream was able to assist with the data migration from Ajaib's previous chat provider. Zaky shares, "During our migration from Sendbird to Stream, the Stream team was incredibly helpful. We gave them our API keys so they could access and export our dashboard data."
Integrating Stream Chat and Activity Feeds
Zaky describes the process of implementing Stream Chat and Feeds by saying, "The Stream team was very helpful from the start. Any requests we had were fulfilled within a day or two." Ajaib's enterprise plans enabled them to leverage dedicated Slack channels to communicate with Stream. He says, "We were able to create a Slack channel instead of going back and forth through email, which helped speed up the migration process and ensure no missteps were made."
He comments on the ample support from Stream's customer success and engineering team, "We had a lot of support from Stream's migration team, too. We've discussed migration a lot with your technical team. Their documentation helped us make things go as smoothly as possible."
Moderating Chat with Stream
After integrating Stream, Zaky and the product team enjoyed the benefits of the AI-powered moderation component. He says, "We tried to build a solution in-house, but it takes quite a lot of technology to make it successful." Zaky continues, "Stream Chat's Auto Moderation functionality is extremely helpful because chat is a forum where users can share anything."
Zaky talks about Ajaib's unique use case for moderation, "Investment apps attract a lot of spammers and scammers who share links to WhatsApp and Telegram groups. It interrupts the user experience, but Stream's Automoderation API makes it easy to flag links, take action against users who share them frequently, and create profanity blocklists to keep the app safe."
But Stream's impact on Ajaib and its community of investors doesn't stop there.
The Impact of Stream on Ajaib
When asked about the business impact of Stream on Ajaib, Zaky says, "Integrating Stream allowed us to reduce development effort by 30%." He continues, "Stream Feeds and the push notification functionality have enabled us to increase user engagement by 30%."
Zaky's final words on the partnership between Ajaib and Stream are, "Stream is a very reliable and scalable product. I've never had any issues, downtime, or required special maintenance. The pricing is very competitive, and the support team is very helpful and responsive."
If you'd like to experience the benefits of integrating Stream, contact our sales team to learn more.
