Karma.red case study

Client

Karma is a growing global p2p loan platform designed to connect borrowers and investors of any caliber or location together. Karma has more than 8,000 investors on the platform, including two banks, and boasts 19.1% average investor APY. 

George Goognin, co-founder of Karma, shares his experience of adopting Directual to help Karma reach business goal faster, better, and cheaper.

Challenge

At Karma, we’re rapidly approaching global expansion and we’ve got quite the appetite. Our product is in demand and we seek to make much more with it than ever before. 

At some point, we decided that the current situation with our dev team is far from desirable. Task delivery, control, and support took way too much time and effort. Thus, the task was to find a low-code solution with a good API framework - to keep our integrations running. Our main integration points are institutional partners - banks and the like. 

Currently, we have one specialist who handles the low-code tech stack (if you can even call it so) and some software development staff - no alternative to that at the moment.

Technology

Directual as back-end platform

Bubble as a front-end platform

Why Directual was chosen

After spending quite some time looking, we came across Directual and knew it was what we wanted. User-friendly interface, amazing functionality, and the Support team (along with an active Telegram community) that speaks our language hit it home for us. 

We understand that Directual might be smaller compared to bigger, more accomplished low-code solutions, yet the bigger they are, the more soulless they become, as we’ve learned in our experience. Solving difficulties with the Support team of a larger solution provider is a literal hell, nothing ever gets done. Here, though, we all know each other now. 

About half of our product is made with low-code/no-code platforms by now.

What could be improved? 

There’s always something to improve, in any SaaS. In our case, the support of a large, venerated project becomes a bit cumbersome after a while, especially when it concerns fields. It takes a bit of know-how to sort the fields into folders and keep track of it all. 

There’s also no built-in documentation functionality yet, and we’ve learned that this is something that could be extremely beneficial in the long run. The visual editor is rather confusing as well, at least for the time being.

Lastly, we know that there are plans for Directual to release the support for a private cloud, which we do need - it’s unfeasible to use Directual for data storage. We are a regulated financial service and must use our own storage cloud for compliance purposes.

Plans ahead 

Karma raised a pre-seed from a VC fund for its US branch branded Evita. It will be focused on the SEC-compliant tokenization of the real estate renovation portfolio. Historical returns on this type of assets are 15-20% APY, and it always was only for multi-millionaires.

Evita democratizes this market, enabling investors to put as small as $100 from almost any country, and have instant liquidity.

With the help of Directual, we plan to advance our product into the next stage. We’ll need to continue the integration process with brokers, regulators, depositaries, and other institutions. Of course, that’ll involve a lot of testing: cust dev, hypothesis testing, and other things low-code platforms like Directual simply do faster and better. 

In case of an interest

In case you’d like to request a reference or any additional case details, please, contact us: hello@directual.com.