Case Studies › Famido
Family & Lifestyle Marketplaces

From Spreadsheets to a Live Family Benefits Marketplace

Techdots built Famido's end-to-end platform — a curated marketplace of family discounts, activities, and perks exclusive to Swiss families and expectant parents. We delivered a self-serve merchant portal, a subscription-gated consumer app, and deep integrations with Swiss payment infrastructure, enabling Famido to scale partnerships without scaling headcount.

Start a Similar Project → ← All Case Studies
F
Famido
Family & Lifestyle Marketplaces
300+
Partner offers launched at go-live
4.2x
Increase in user activation rate post-launch
68%
Reduction in partner onboarding time
16 weeks
timeline
This engagement is best for
Marketplace startups needing a two-sided platform built quickly
Consumer apps targeting specific demographics with gated benefits
Businesses managing 100+ merchant or partner relationships
Founders in regulated markets like Switzerland requiring localized payment and compliance tooling
The Transformation

Before & After

Before
✕ Partner deals were tracked in spreadsheets, making it impossible to scale beyond 30-40 merchants
✕ Families had no single destination to discover offers — links were shared manually via email newsletters
✕ New merchant onboarding took 2-3 weeks of back-and-forth coordination by hand
✕ No subscription management existed — renewals and cancellations were handled manually
✕ Analytics were non-existent, so Famido couldn't tell which offers were actually driving engagement
After
✓ A fully operational two-sided marketplace live in Switzerland with 300+ curated offers at launch
✓ Families access personalized deals by life stage — pregnancy, toddler, school-age — through a clean mobile-first interface
✓ Merchants self-onboard in under 48 hours via a guided partner portal with contract and asset upload
✓ Subscription billing, trial management, and cancellation flows run automatically via Stripe
✓ A built-in analytics dashboard shows Famido which categories, merchants, and offer types drive retention
What We Built

Deliverables & Scope

Every item below was chosen because it directly addressed a business bottleneck — not because it was technically interesting.

01
Mobile-optimized consumer storefront with life-stage filtering (pregnancy, 0-3, 4-12 years) and full-text offer search
02
Self-serve merchant portal with onboarding wizard, offer management, usage reporting, and bulk upload via CSV
03
Subscription and membership billing system with Stripe, including trial periods, family plan tiers, and dunning logic
04
Admin dashboard for Famido staff to curate offers, approve merchants, manage featured placements, and pull export reports
05
Automated email notification system for new offer alerts, expiry reminders, and post-signup onboarding sequences
06
Offer redemption tracking with unique code generation and per-merchant analytics to demonstrate ROI to partners
ROI Logic

Why This Generated
Real Business Value

Famido's revenue model depends on converting free users to paid subscribers and retaining merchant partners who see measurable traffic. By automating merchant onboarding and providing partners with their own analytics, Famido turned a manual sales-heavy process into a self-serve flywheel — reducing cost-per-partner acquisition significantly. The subscription billing automation alone eliminated dozens of hours of manual monthly admin, freeing the founding team to focus on growth rather than operations.

Key Outcomes
300+
Partner offers launched at go-live
4.2x
Increase in user activation rate post-launch
68%
Reduction in partner onboarding time
Why It Worked

The Decisions That
Made the Difference

Good execution matters. But the right early decisions matter more.

01
We built for both sides of the marketplace simultaneously — merchants and families — rather than phasing one out, which meant launch day was truly live, not half-functional
02
Life-stage segmentation was baked into the data model from day one, making personalization a structural feature rather than a retrofit
03
Choosing Stripe for billing in a Swiss-first context meant we could support CHF natively with minimal compliance overhead
04
We shipped a functional merchant portal early and used real partner feedback to iterate the onboarding flow before general availability, cutting go-live friction dramatically
Tech Stack
Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL Hotwire (Turbo + Stimulus) Tailwind CSS Sidekiq
Integrations
Stripe (subscriptions, CHF billing, dunning) Postmark (transactional email) Cloudinary (merchant asset and image management) Google Analytics 4 (user behavior tracking) Zapier (partner CRM sync and internal alerting)
Start your project

Have a Similar Problem?

Start with a Software + AI Audit. We'll map your workflows, identify the highest-ROI opportunities, and give you a clear roadmap before you commit to development.

Get a Software + AI Audit → ← View All Case Studies