Built With MongoDB: Go

Siya Raj Purohit
May 5, 2021 | Updated: August 1, 2023
#BuiltWithMongoDB#Startups

“Social media was supposed to augment our friendships and give us more to talk about — but it’s actually starting to replace our relationships,” laments Sean Conrad, the co-founder and CEO of Go.

After 10 years of working at large tech companies and bootstrapping a multimillion-dollar gaming company, Sean started building Go, a social app focused on helping friends create plans to hang out in person. Combining data science, social networking, and event aggregation, Go provides users with a custom, curated feed of cool things to do and friends to do them with.

Go is live in New Zealand and (very recently) Australia with over 40,000 downloads and 500 businesses. The startup has raised $6.7 million in seed funding and has been building with MongoDB from the start.

For this edition of #BuiltWithMongoDB, we spoke with Sean about the business, being a second-time founder and CEO, and his experience with MongoDB.

MongoDB: You actually started building during the COVID-19 pandemic. How did that impact the product, given that your mission is to bring people together in real life?

Sean: It impacted us in so many ways. We researched the space throughout 2019, and started building the app in early 2020, planning for a fall release in Portland or Los Angeles. And then the pandemic hit the United States. We realized it was jokingly bad that we were building an app to bring people together just when social distancing was becoming a requirement.

For a month, we contemplated a lot of possible ideas, and we had some cool ones, but our passion was really about making offline connections stronger. We spent the summer working on the product, and then launched in New Zealand because that country had handled the pandemic well and reopened. The product has been a huge success in New Zealand, and after iterating on it, we recently launched in Australia. Our plan is to launch in the United States, starting from Los Angeles, during the summer of 2021.

MongoDB: You mentioned that you've used MongoDB before. What has your experience been like with MongoDB as a 2x founder?

Sean: At my previous company, we scaled up to about 30 million downloads, and we ran it on MongoDB. We were not database experts, and it was very easy to use. It was 2013 when we started using MongoDB. We had our hiccups and had to learn what indexes were, but we became really comfortable with the platform. For Go, we picked MongoDB out of comfort.

When we got started with Go, MongoDB Realm was still in preview. We would’ve used it had it been around, but we built our first product on Firebase Firestore. Firestore ended up being a bit limiting for us because we wanted to build a feed-based system (in Go, it’s showcasing a series of events or things to do that are interesting to you and your friends), so a lot of filters are necessary. That requires many different types of unstructured data that’s difficult to put into a simple schema. Managing these things demands a lot of documents and data duplication, and MongoDB was a good fit for that.

We like that Atlas has full-text search built on Apache Lucene, which is a powerful text search library. We are just getting into that.

In addition, most of our compute runs on AWS. We use a lot of containerized stuff on AWS, and a little bit of Lambda stuff, and we’re moving to a serverless environment. I’m not sure what the future of Go is, but I’m confident MongoDB will play a part in it.

Our mobile app is written in Flutter, Google’s competitor to React Native. We like that quite a bit.

MongoDB: What is the last technical podcast you enjoyed?

Sean: It’s All About Widgets, a podcast about Flutter. We’ve got a really talented group of developers on our team — two of them are ranked in the top 15 Stack Overflow Flutter contributors! One of our developers Raouf Rahiche spoke on their second episode. It was really cool to hear a team member talking on this podcast.

MongoDB: As a second-time founder, what is one thing that was unexpected for you in building this business?

Sean: This is the first business in which I’ve raised funding, and I couldn’t have done it without my co-founder, Jesse Berns. For my last business, I started with something small with a few people, found product-market fit, and grew that. With Go, we started with a much more grand vision in mind, so it made sense to operate more like a traditional Silicon Valley startup, raising capital and growing the team quickly. With all startups, you’re operating with very few known facts, but when you raise money everything just tends to get bigger, faster, and I always say this is like ‘operating on hard mode’ — but in our case, it’s worth it.

Our goal with Go is to help people manage their friendships in the same way that LinkedIn helps people manage their professional lives, and if we’re successful, that’ll entirely change how people make plans and optimize their friendships for more time together face-to-face. It’s built to inspire us to live our ideal lives, whether that’s basement art shows, unforgettable live music, lunch with friends at a special place that could only exist in your neighborhood, or a slow bike ride down by the river. It’s built for the mundane and the thrilling and everything in between.

We’re at a really exciting moment in history where all the trends — adoption of mobile, the upcoming end to the pandemic — are going to enable a culture where people want to find humanity and joy in person, and human-facing tech is going to have a big impact in the next few years. With Go, we’re really excited to be part of that.

Looking to build something cool? Get started with the MongoDB for Startups program.

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Built With MongoDB: Buffer

I first became a fan of Buffer during graduate school. While managing social marketing for student clubs and conferences, I relied on Buffer to manage our fun marketing campaigns. Buffer is a popular social media software that enables small businesses and content creators to plan, publish, and analyze marketing campaigns across social channels. It serves 67,536 customers across over 85 countries. The company has over $21M annual recurring revenue and has been in business for 10 years now. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Dan Farrelly , Buffer’s CTO, about the fast-growing company, his experience with MongoDB for Startups , and the challenges of growing into a CTO position. MongoDB: Let’s go back to February 2014. At that time, Buffer was a much smaller company — only about 15 people, compared with the more than 80 people now. What drew you to join? Dan: Hands down, the culture. There were two things that were unique about Buffer at that time: First, it was an entirely remote team. This was rare in the pre-pandemic world. Second, there was incredible transparency both inside and outside the org. The company was so open about salary that on the Buffer Jobs page, it had an estimated salary calculator based on role and experience. Internally, all revenue numbers and company metrics were accessible to the entire team. The executives being an open book enabled trust and free communication across the organization. And like any startup, we were all-in. Early on, I remember being at a taco shop on a Friday evening when the then-CTO texted me that the servers were crashing. I opened up my laptop at the restaurant and just started troubleshooting — doing whatever I could to try to mitigate the issue. Many people depended on us to manage their social identities, and so with a taco in one hand, and a phone on the other, we figured it out. Working at a startup is such an incredible learning curve; you have to be scrappy, push the boundaries, and find creative ways to deliver results. MongoDB: Why did the team decide to build with MongoDB? Dan: Our culture has always been engineering-centric, focused on shipping code as soon as it’s ready for production. We encourage continuous delivery of our applications. MongoDB’s products resonate with that lean culture. MongoDB doesn’t require schema migrations; the flexibility and ease of use enabled us to practice the type of engineering we wanted. MongoDB became our partner in being fast and delivering often. An additional benefit was the ability to scale easily: one type of application we were building (content scheduling for social media) had massive collection of data that had to be scheduled which required very high throughput — we were posting hundreds of thousands of times a day for social media accounts. MongoDB Atlas allowed us to scale and ensure we didn’t have to worry about our database over the years. MongoDB: Had you used MongoDB before joining Buffer? Dan: I had taken a MongoDB University course in 2012 focused on MongoDB for Node.js developers, and I had built a few side projects and prototypes with MongoDB. The course itself was fantastic: it not only talked about basic things such as setting up replication, sharding, and how the database itself works, but it also talked about some of the more complex elements (how drivers work, write concern, and fully leveraging the database). But the best way to learn about MongoDB was putting out fires at Buffer. Early on, we had monitoring and scaling issues, not with the database but with the code, and our team had to get smart about diagnosing specific issues in our application. MongoDB: What advice do you have for an engineer who wants to grow into a CTO position someday? Dan: Engineers can pursue their own roles and do a really good job while still having a limited perspective of the company. In order to become a CTO, you really need to broaden that perspective, and understand how technical strategy supports business goals. The CTO doesn’t have to be the most technical person on the team, but has to have a well-rounded view of the business and also effectively communicate across the stack. Transparency at Buffer helped me develop a wider perspective of the business. If you have ambitions to grow into a CTO role, build relationships across the organization — on the technical and business sides — and think strategically about how the code you ship drives business metrics. Looking to build something cool? Get started with the MongoDB for Startups program.

April 28, 2021
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Building AI With MongoDB: Integrating Vector Search And Cohere to Build Frontier Enterprise Apps

Cohere is the leading enterprise AI platform, building large language models (LLMs) which help businesses unlock the potential of their data. Operating at the frontier of AI, Cohere’s models provide a more intuitive way for users to retrieve, summarize, and generate complex information. Cohere offers both text generation and embedding models to its customers. Enterprises running mission-critical AI workloads select Cohere because its models offer the best performance-cost tradeoff and can be deployed in production at scale. Cohere’s platform is cloud-agnostic. Their models are accessible through their own API as well as popular cloud managed services, and can be deployed on a virtual private cloud (VPC) or even on-prem to meet companies where their data is, offering the highest levels of flexibility and control. Cohere’s leading Embed 3 and Rerank 3 models can be used with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search to convert MongoDB data to vectors and build a state-of-the-art semantic search system. Search results also can be passed to Cohere’s Command R family of models for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with citations. Check out our AI resource page to learn more about building AI-powered apps with MongoDB. A new approach to vector embeddings It is in the realm of embedding where Cohere has made a host of recent advances. Described as “AI for language understanding,” Embed is Cohere’s leading text representation language model. Cohere offers both English and multilingual embedding models, and gives users the ability to specify the type of data they are computing an embedding for (e.g., search document, search query). The result is embeddings that improve the accuracy of search results for traditional enterprise search or retrieval-augmented generation. One challenge developers faced using Embed was that documents had to be passed one by one to the model endpoint, limiting throughput when dealing with larger data sets. To address that challenge and improve developer experience, Cohere has recently announced its new Embed Jobs endpoint . Now entire data sets can be passed in one operation to the model, and embedded outputs can be more easily ingested back into your storage systems. Additionally, with only a few lines of code, Rerank 3 can be added at the final stage of search systems to improve accuracy. It also works across 100+ languages and offers uniquely high accuracy on complex data such as JSON, code, and tabular structure. This is particularly useful for developers who rely on legacy dense retrieval systems. Demonstrating how developers can exploit this new endpoint, we have published the How to use Cohere embeddings and rerank modules with MongoDB Atlas tutorial . Readers will learn how to store, index, and search the embeddings from Cohere. They will also learn how to use the Cohere Rerank model to provide a powerful semantic boost to the quality of keyword and vector search results. Figure 1: Illustrating the embedding generation and search workflow shown in the tutorial Why MongoDB Atlas and Cohere? MongoDB Atlas provides a proven OLTP database handling high read and write throughput backed by transactional guarantees. Pairing these capabilities with Cohere’s batch embeddings is massively valuable to developers building sophisticated gen AI apps. Developers can be confident that Atlas Vector Search will handle high scale vector ingestion, making embeddings immediately available for accurate and reliable semantic search and RAG. Increasing the speed of experimentation, developers and data scientists can configure separate vector search indexes side by side to compare the performance of different parameters used in the creation of vector embeddings. In addition to batch embeddings, Atlas Triggers can also be used to embed new or updated source content in real time, as illustrated in the Cohere workflow shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: MongoDB Atlas Vector Search supports Cohere’s batch and real time workflows. (Image courtesy of Cohere) Supporting both batch and real-time embeddings from Cohere makes MongoDB Atlas well suited to highly dynamic gen AI-powered apps that need to be grounded in live, operational data. Developers can use MongoDB’s expressive query API to pre-filter query predicates against metadata, making it much faster to access and retrieve the more relevant vector embeddings. The unification and synchronization of source application data, metadata, and vector embeddings in a single platform, accessed by a single API, makes building gen AI apps faster, with lower cost and complexity. Those apps can be layered on top of the secure, resilient, and mature MongoDB Atlas developer data platform that is used today by over 45,000 customers spanning startups to enterprises and governments handling mission-critical workloads. What's next? To start your journey into gen AI and Atlas Vector Search, review our 10-minute Learning Byte . In the video, you’ll learn about use cases, benefits, and how to get started using Atlas Vector Search.

April 25, 2024