Context & problematic

Privateaser is a free online reservation platform for more than 3000 bars and restaurants in France and Spain. The platform enables customers to discover and book rooms, bars, restaurants, and other venues to hold events or gatherings.

After raising $14M, Privateaser launched special B2B offers for corporate events. Within these special offers, they wanted to give their customers the ability to book not only venues for their events, but also catering & events’ animations.

To do so, they curated professional caterer and events companies and organized the data in a spreadsheet. From there, they wanted to build two separate marketplaces, one for the caterers and one for the animations companies. From these marketplaces, clients would be able to browse the offers easily and book online.

Work done & solution

The product team initially thought about migrating the content from the spreadsheet to their custom back-end and then building the marketplaces’ front-end from scratch. By doing this, the team estimated that it would take approximately 2 months to be live and a heavy load of senior developer resources.

This was too much time for Privateaser to launch their new offer. That’s when they turned to weweb.io.

Considering this solution, they realized that a lot of time could be saved:

Back-end: the back-end and the front-end being decoupled in weweb.io, the only thing they had to do is migrating their CSV data to Google Sheet and use Google Sheet's API to establish communication with the front-end. The back-end was sorted out in a matter of minutes.
Front-end: using weweb.io's visual editor, about 80% of the website could be built without coding, saving a lot of precious development time. The 20% custom components (forms & filters) were built by developers and then uploaded in weweb.io so non-technical teams could finalize to assemble the website.
Maintenance / updates: another important argument for choosing weweb.io among other solutions is that the product team can use 100% no-code tools to update the platform when needed -> to add new caterers or animations in the marketplace they just need to update the google sheet. To change the layouts, colors, or any front-end elements, they can use weweb.io's visual editor.
Deployment: finally, Privateaser didn’t have to take care of web-optimization work. The marketplaces generated using this weweb.io + Google Sheets stack are statically generated by the tool and deployed on a CDN infrastructure so the sites are blazing fast. As a result, the product team is fully autonomous with the deployment workflow. as they can push from pre-production to production directly from weweb.io's dashboard, without disturbing the technical teams.

The two marketplaces were launched in two weeks instead of two months. Here are the links to the live websites if you want to see the final result:

Catering marketplace: https://traiteur.privateaser.com/
Animation marketplace: https://animation.privateaser.com/ Privateaser's VP product Benjamin Malartic looked for a solution to build these marketplaces and launch them as fast as possible in order to test these new products quickly.