Case Studies

How cloud migration assisted Strawman in launching their new platform and scaling with confidence

Louise Glover
August 3, 2021

Strawman is the premier online investment club in Australia. Using exclusive research management and networking tools, Strawman leverages the concept of community. Their members, who comprise a number of experienced investors, collaborate to share insights and research. Ultimately the platform acts as a place for the delivery of independent, accountable and actionable sharemarket research, insights and recommendations.

Experience Digital was initially introduced to Strawman to complete a website health assessment and assist with web system back-end issues. Strawman had multiple concerns, one of which was an underlying problem that was not allowing them to perform upgrades. This is a common problem experienced by companies as they begin to scale up and outgrow their current infrastructure.

''Experience Digital has provided fantastic service and is very professional. They have a great understanding of system design and work well with stakeholders.''

Andrew Page – Founder

Our approach

Within the discovery phase, Strawman discussed potential opportunities with the Experience Digital team. As a result, they tasked us with the development of their application and the launch of Strawman’s 3.0 version of their core product. As a customer-facing product, the design was of high importance to the whole customer experience.

With this in mind, the technical team undertook a detailed technical analysis of the existing system in order to methodically manage the upgrade and new build. This involved scoping an entirely new user experience (UX) and creating new features within the platform. New features were implemented, including a scorecard that tracked trades in real-time and integrated directly with the ASX.

Experience Digital also migrated the core infrastructure to an AWS cloud-based hosting arrangement. This provided numerous benefits for Strawman, as the solution provided the ability to scale with speed and confidence. Furthermore, utilising cloud architecture provided robustness, better value for money through flexibility and higher availability of data.

The outcome

Since Experience Digital’s engagement with Strawman and the implementation of new features within their 3.0 product, the platform’s user experience has been greatly improved. The Strawman team was extremely impressed with the functionality of the new features as well as the new and improved complimentary, sharp design.

In addition, the ability to provide real-time gain and loss tracking for their community has greatly increased within their product offering and is described as a huge value add. Furthermore, combined with the migration to a cloud-centred solution, Strawman now benefits from cost optimisation and infinite scalability. This will support the organisation throughout its inevitably large growth trajectory in the future.