Coupla Scales Their Platform with Joyent

So, you’ve met your other half. What happens next? According to Coupla, a unique new startup born out of Las Vegas Startup Weekend, an important part of being a happy couple is having a great group of friends who are also in relationships, that both people like.

“Research shows that making ‘couple’ friends is important to your happiness,” says Adam Kramer, CEO and founder of Coupla. “We came up with a great way for couples to meet other couples, a platform that allows people to share great experiences together. Our mission is to make happy couples happier.” Through events -- which span experiences like learning the art of trapeze to volunteering at local nonprofit organizations -- couples can meet others with similar interests, form great friendships, and enhance their own relationships.

Coupla launched in beta in January 2013 and has been using lean methodologies to build out the core of their platform, which showcases different events that couples can sign up for. Today, they’re taking a big step forward with the launch of their new website, but that’s only the beginning. Over the next few months they’re rolling out a more interactive, social platform -- one that lets couples host their own events as well as find experiential events that will help get them involved in their local community.

As part of the tight knit group of startups founded in Las Vegas, Coupla’s CTO Adam Englander turned to startup adivsor Jason Mendenhall, Executive Vice President, Cloud at Switch, for advice on what cloud provider Coupla should partner with, and Mendenhall recommended Joyent.

“Joyent was more than we needed at first, since we were such a small company -- but since it was so affordable, it’s able to provide us with a lot of the bandwidth to do what we’re doing, to expand our user base and build our conversion funnel to bring more couples to our site,” says Englander. “As a small startup, vertical scalability was really important to us. I didn’t want to have to reprovision boxes every time I needed CPU or RAM. We were looking for a data-centric system, and for that, Joyent is absolutely the right cloud provider.” Since using Joyent, Coupla has also experienced “zero downtime,” which Englander says is “fantastic.”

For their team, one of the really big draws about Joyent was that it allows the company to stretch out their bootstrap. “At this point, we’ll be able to handle growing to at least 200,000 members without spending a ton of money,” says Englander. “And for being such a small startup, the Joyent team has provided wonderful customer service, giving us more information and support than I could ever imagine.”

We were looking for a data-centric system, and for that, Joyent is absolutely the right cloud provider. - Adam Englander, Coupla CTO

As for third-party applications, Coupla also uses SmartOS and Mongo DB, which they found “simplified clustering.” The team is also is planning on taking advantage of Chef integration in the near future.

While Coupla is only based in Las Vegas for now, they’re planning on expanding soon. “Because of Joyent, we have the opportunity to scale into other markets, hopefully by the end of the year we can bring the Coupla platform to more couples in other cities,” says Adam Kramer. They also hope to build out their mobile presence, which will allow couples to easily discover new events. Visit their newly launched website to stay posted on when they might be coming to a city near you!



Post written by Hannah Simon