Pulse. Social Network With Prizes

Local businesses spend heavily on digital ads that generate clicks but not visits – the average online-to-offline conversion rate sits below 2% for small merchants. Pulse needed a social platform that turns in-app engagement into real foot traffic to nearby stores through gamification and reward mechanics. The technical constraint: real-time challenge processing and push notifications with 99%+ delivery rate across 100,000+ users while keeping merchant campaign setup simple enough that non-technical store owners could launch promotions in minutes.

The team’s goals were to:

• Allow users to earn prizes and discounts from local stores through their social activity.
• Offer merchants a digital platform to engage customers nearby.
• Facilitate real-time challenges, campaigns, and reward distribution.
• Establish a scalable foundation for expansion across multiple cities and countries.

We brought extensive experience in consumer-facing platforms and event-driven architectures. Our design uses Apache Kafka to stream user actions, campaign participation and prize claims in real time, with Flink processing these events for instant progress updates. We built a self-service merchant dashboard where store owners create targeted promotions in under 5 minutes – no technical skills required. The push notification pipeline achieves 99.2% delivery rate to keep users engaged between store visits.

The backend is built on Java and Spring Boot, providing a reliable foundation for APIs, user activity tracking, and reward logic. We use Apache Kafka to stream events such as user actions, campaign participation, and prize claims. Apache Flink processes these events in real time, enabling instantaneous updates on user progress and reward availability.

Pulse offers a modern, mobile-friendly interface built with React and NextJS. Users can discover nearby offers, participate in challenges, and track rewards through an intuitive feed optimized for everyday use.

Apache Cassandra stores user profiles, merchant data, and engagement history at scale. Apache Pinot powers real-time analytics dashboards that provide insights into campaign performance and user activity. Redis is used for low-latency caching of active challenges and rewards. The platform runs on Kubernetes with Istio for traffic management and is deployed on AWS to ensure high availability and elasticity.

Users can earn points, prizes, or discounts by engaging with content, completing challenges, or visiting partner stores. Rewards are tied directly to local businesses.

Local businesses create campaigns, set prize rules, and monitor engagement through dedicated dashboards. This enables them to attract and retain nearby customers effectively.

All user actions and reward updates are processed in real time, ensuring transparency and instant feedback within the app.

We built a platform that connects 100,000+ monthly active users with local stores and businesses. Our in-app promotions achieve an 8.5% click-through rate – over 4x the industry average of 2% for local commerce – proving that social gamification is a far more effective driver of local engagement than traditional ads.

We delivered a self-service dashboard where small businesses launch targeted promotions in under 5 minutes without technical skills. Our participating merchants report a 27% increase in foot traffic within the first 90 days on the platform – a measurable return that fuels organic merchant onboarding.

We architected a platform where new cities onboard in under 2 weeks with localized content and merchant integration. Our infrastructure maintains 99.9% uptime with sub-150ms feed loading and a push notification delivery rate of 99.2% – the reliability backbone that makes rapid geographic expansion possible.