This case study sets out the work Mindera carried out together with DeadHappy, a truly unique life insurance brand.

Overview

• Client: DeadHappy
• Industry: Finance
• Project type: Web development
• Tech used: AWS, React, GraphQL, and Node

About DeadHappy

DeadHappy is a life insurance company that was founded in 2013. It was formed to turn death planning into a livelier topic. The purpose of this is to make it easier for people to talk about and plan for their death.

DeadHappy is shaking things up in the life insurance industry. It’s saying goodbye to long and boring forms, irritating phone calls, and shady pricing.

DeadHappy is challenging conversations around death and providing customers with the chance to leave something of meaning when they say die.

At the time of writing, DeadHappy has pledged tens of thousands of deathwishes and helped over 4,000 life insurance customers.

What’s a deathwish? DeadHappy describes it as:

“Not the desire for self-annihilation, but our way of helping you express what you want to happen when you die.”

Executive summary

Mindera supports DeadHappy in its mission to change attitudes towards death and make planning for loss simpler.

In 2019 DeadHappy expanded its whole team, including developers, partnering with Mindera and adopting a lean/agile way of working.

This was all with the aim of improving user experience, developing accessibility features, and making waves in the world of life insurance.

Mindera worked together with DeadHappy to develop a new web platform that’s easy to use, grows and adapts quickly, and provides one million deathwishes.

Challenges

DeadHappy faced the following challenges that needed to be tackled, resolved, and future-proofed:

• Improve scalability for future growth.
• Create an effective user journey to improve conversions.
• Improve time to market for parallel delivery of new features.
  

Solutions

Mindera helped DeadHappy to overcome its challenges by providing a solution that delivered the following three key results:

• A new website that’s scalable and can handle exponential user growth.
• A more logical user journey that helps increase conversion rates.
• New features can now be available to end-users within very short timescales.

Before getting started with the project, we needed to thoroughly understand DeadHappy’s current limitations, along with any challenges on scalability and implementing new features.

To tap into the passion and dedication at DeadHappy, we held an initial workshop to discuss the brand’s vision. We did this to establish how Mindera could support DeadHappy’s mission and create a scalable platform that would be easy to adapt and use.

Commencing with the articulation of the architecture, tech stack, and frameworks, we put our resources and knowledge into a Sprint 0 to define the requirements, expectations, and design.

As the project began, we supported the existing website to enable users to access the service, ensuring that usability wasn’t affected while we developed new features.

DeadHappy has adopted a modern approach, which helps secure its future development needs by using a microservice architecture that utilises AWS, React, GraphQL and Node. This has helped increase reliability and performance, creating a higher return on investment and improved usability.

The original website codebase was in PHP and initially it offered life insurance as the sole product. During the project, the codebase was refactored to introduce the concept of multiple products. DeadHappy is now able to offer a range of products beyond life insurance, including near-death cover.

We introduced the following three key features as part of the solution we developed for DeadHappy:

• Ability to share a deathwish.
• New dashboard.
• Seamless user journey.

Results

We developed three new features for DeadHappy. Below, we explain how they help its business.

Ability to share a deathwish

The team created the ability to share a Deathwish with friends and family on social media, which encourages more users to explore DeadHappy.

This allows beneficiaries to be aware of what the deceased person wants to happen when they die, rather than them deciding or (worse) guessing.

Utilising the new tech stack meant a quick turnaround and release to market.

New dashboard

We developed a new dashboard to allow easy viewing of the customer’s deathwishes, which can be created, updated, and shared with family and friends.

In today’s tech-savvy world it was imperative that the dashboard was mobile-friendly and included a clear call to action.

More DeadHappy customers have been managing their policies and sharing their deathwishes since the new dashboard was implemented.

Seamless user journey

We provided seamless legacy integration, so that the previous platform could still be utilised (with no downtime) whilst having the ability to develop and release new features quickly.

The new tech stack allowed the application to be backwards compatible while enabling it to be scalable. This creates a seamless user journey for DeadHappy’s customers.

• DeadHappy was also able to provide a continuous service to its existing customers, as well as being able to get new customers on board.

These are some of the additional benefits we’ve delivered DeadHappy:

• An improvement in the security and scalability of the platforms.
• An ability to get new products to market more quickly.
  

Client's words

Some nice words from one of our friends at DeadHappy (at the time this case study was produced):

“DeadHappy has been working with Mindera for over six months and we have been delighted with the partnership.

“They took on responsibility for our existing platform (from our US partner) in record time allowing us to transition away within a month.

“The core Mindera team (based in UK and Porto) work as integral members of our own team and happily adopt our engineering practices. Additionally, Mindera helped us to set up initial processes and ways of working and, most recently, helped us to form our Cyber Security Plan.

"Culturally, Mindera have been an excellent fit and we have been able to benefit greatly from their five years experience of running as a self-managed culture to set ourselves up in a similar way.

“During the six months we have, as can be expected with a start-up, changed priorities and also evolved our engineering and delivery processes. And it has been great to see how Mindera have worked closely with us on these and made any adjustments we have requested of them.

“I would happily act as a reference for any company considering working with them in the future.”

Looking for a tech partner? Get in touch!

DeadHappy is one of the many incredible brands we’ve been fortunate to work with build a lasting relationship. If you need a caring partner that really invests in its client’s ambitions then please get in touch with us. We’d love to work with you and help your business.