homeis is the first digital platform for foreign-born communities around the world with an aim to build a better internet for immigrants. Through homeis, one can join a community of locals who share the same homeland, find friends to share aspects of their cultural background, form a network of mutual aid and assistance, and discover elements of their new home with those who understand their original one. The team at homeis is creating a one-stop-shop for everything foreign-born ex-pats need while living abroad.
homeis has more than 200k users and operates in six national communities: Mexicans, Indians, French, French-Speaking-Africans, Israelis in the USA, and French in Israel.
homeis’s main offerings are social: a social feed, chat, and discussion groups. Additionally, homeis provides a utility component through real estate and job markets, lists of professionals to hire, and special coupons and promotions to support immigrants settling into a new home.
Challenge
homeis has a full-stack development team that can seamlessly jump between platforms. They chose Javascript as their main language, React-Native for their mobile app, React for their web app, and Node.JS for their backend. They needed to leverage a third-party SDK that was built for this stack. Building it in-house would have taken too much time and too many resources - homeis is a startup, so they needed to put all of their efforts into their own product while avoiding reinventing the wheel wherever possible. They set out to find a solution that was focused solely on developing feeds and chat with SDKs and APIs that matched their stack.
homeis’ product has had built-in chat capabilities since day one. However, their previous chat provider had stability issues with a slow and inefficient support team. homeis knew that they had to find another option or build their chat functionality internally from the ground-up. That’s where Stream comes in for the rescue!
Why Stream
When homeis heard that Stream was introducing a chat platform to their product offerings, they were thrilled as they had already been using Stream’s feeds product very successfully for quite some time. They immediately began working with Stream, migrating off their previous chat provider. Stream had SDKs that matched the tech stack at homeis, making it simple to quickly build an MVP and fine-tune the product from this point forward. homeis needed a fast and efficient solution to speed up the feed and chat development process without heavy investment, and Stream was their number one candidate after sifting through their available options.
Primary reasons that homeis integrated Stream:
- Time to market
- Specialty and focus
- Simple Implementation
- Trusted partner
Another important element that caused homeis to choose Stream was because of their online resources, including comprehensive tutorials, demonstrating how to integrate Stream’s products. Ady Levy, VP of Research and Development at homeis says, “There are very well written documents on your site to kick off any development - plus, there is a nicely built demo app to showcase the capabilities of your SDKs.”
homeis and Stream have worked well together since the beginning of their partnership.
“As time went by and our use cases got more advanced, we started chatting with the team [at Stream] to get answers. We feel that we established a good relationship with the team, and with time, we moved between the tiers toward a personalized feed solution. For a few weeks, our team worked in a tight relationship with the Stream team to achieve our goals for the product.” - Ady Levy, VP of R&D at homeis
homeis and Stream continue to work in tandem to continually progress an app that improves the life experiences of immigrants by helping them create new wings without losing their roots.
“Chat is working great for us - we have many features that we didn’t have using our old chat provider. Our audience grew by 1000% so we have seen a steep increase in chat usage with a stable chat solution.” - Ady Levy, VP of R&D at homeis
Future Vision
homeis has a vision of expanding its reach to many more nationalities within the United States. After that, they would like to take this concept internationally so that ex-pats around the globe can have a way to find familiarity in their new homes.
