Background
FAYA — "fire" — set out to put the coolest party events in Cologne and the surrounding region into a fast, modern app. By the time the project came to us, the app had been started but wasn't production-grade: no professional operations, no clear backend architecture, no strategy for data protection and infrastructure. At the same time, the founder wanted to stay hands-on despite not having a classical engineering background — a setup we see often and that's rarely solved cleanly.
Solution
We took the project over end-to-end and moved it into a healthy state.
- Takeover and clean-up. Existing Flutter code was analysed, stabilised, and evolved at the points where the app actually gains personality — speed, discoverability of events, a clear conversion funnel.
- Migration to European infrastructure. The app runs on Scaleway in the EU, backed by PostgreSQL. Sovereign cloud isn't a label here, it's an operational choice: anyone building a community app has an honest responsibility towards their users.
- Strapi as content platform. Events, locations, curation and editorial content all run through a Strapi backend we set up and operate. The editorial team moves fast without funnelling everything through engineering.
- Enablement with a safety net. We walk the founder through cloud and content workflows so he can handle smaller changes himself. Everything technically relevant still goes through our hands — reviewed, validated, released — so data protection and security stay non-negotiable.
Outcome
FAYA stays meaningfully "alive": stable ops, fast iteration, a scalable backend and an app that matches the lifestyle it promises. The founder gets to tell the story and shape content; we keep the engine room running.
Why this fits us
Plenty of teams can evolve an app. Few will carry it when the founder isn't an engineer and shouldn't be patronised. We're not an outsourcing vendor here — we're shared technical responsibility. That's exactly the role we work best in.