PEP Protect

PEP Stores and their insurance partner wanted to explore a new digital channel for selling cellphone insurance on smartphones purchased through PEP Stores. Before committing significant resources to a risky new product and channel, PEP and their insurance partner wanted to develop a low cost minimum viable product or MVP to test the concept and business model. An initial design partner, selected by the insurer, had done much of the early design work on the project and it was now necessary to select a development partner to bring the MVP to life. Flat Rock was selected due to its expertise in mobile centric development and design and in particular our experience with performance on low cost devices.

Given the need for quick, low cost development for this type of early stage concept testing, React JS was selected as the development framework with its large number of relevant libraries and sizeable developer community. In a similar vein the back-end was built on Firebase using TypeScript as it’s services are quick and simple to use.

Leveraging an event-based architecture centered around Firebase Firestore and Functions, the team were also able to distribute the work evenly across the team and cost effectively divide the work to achieve a high degree of parallelism as each team member could then focus only on their immediate areas of focus.

Thanks to this approach our clients were able to inexpensively and quickly determine that some of the original assumptions behind the business model were flawed. These learnings were then taken on board by the commercial team and used to re-design the consumer value proposition.