Before I start my story about why we build PowerTalk, let me first introduce myself. I started my career as an iOS developer, and first building Scoop apps (now acquired by Kompas Gramedia), and continue working on several different startups, including Traveloka. In Traveloka, I started when they have around 12 people technical team, and left when they have more than 100. Gaining so many experiences and learn how to grow and build a startup from a small team to become a successful one. The challenge and agility makes me love to work at a startup. This passion and love guide me and lead me to co-found "Moselo - A place to find unique product, service, and experiences" as CTO, together with Richard Fang and Erwin Andreas. I meet great people when building Moselo, and together we create a very good and strong team.
We build Moselo with chat commerce in mind, and the core and most important thing for chat commerce is of course the chat platform. We start researching about chat framework, and looking for an option to go with our customization, but we couldn't find a perfect match. So with our ego as a developer, we choose to build our own, we pick an open-source engine, customize it, build the mobile apps, and proudly launched Moselo. At first, the chat seems to work well, but along with the growth of the user, it became unusable. The room list start to lag, and some of the messages in the chat room became buggy. From this experience, we analyze our current engine, find the flaw, learning our mistakes, and redesign everything from scratch. We think everything carefully, like how to handle message history, how we make the room list seamless, how to handle the data in the frontend, and how to make the frontend and backend work seamlessly, and we design the user interface and experience as good as possible. All of this process took us almost a year to build and perfect the chat engine.
On our journey to build a chat platform for Moselo, then we think, there must be another startup have the same problem with us, feel the burden of finding, and building a robust chat platform. So with this, we think, it would be a great solution for so many developers out there if we can offer this chat platform as a service, therefore, TapTalk.io is born. Building a chat platform might seem easy, but there are so many things to taken care of. Our vision and encouragement is to help another developer to implement in-app chat easily, and bring the best chat interaction and experience for all of their users.
With that goal, we prepared our library to bring the best UI/UX possible, we learn from big consumer chat apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and many others. We research and learn how their user feel about their favorite messaging apps, and we took the goodness to TapTalk.io. Not only the UI/UX, but we also think and designing how the data is managed and stored in local device, and what is the most efficient way for the device to communicate with our server. And also, we know that branding really matters, we make our library to easily customizable, with many flexibility. All font, icon, color, and many other things can be customized. And PowerTalk also support custom chat bubble, developers can explore and create their own chat bubble with their own logic, and put it in PowerTalk UI. With this approach, we hope we can be a solution for many developers problem out there. If you need more information or have some suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us at hello@taptalk.io.
