Pryzebox

Discover. Play. Win.

IndustryMedia & Entertainment

Team6 Members

Started In2022

ClientVivomi Inc.

CountryUnited States

Opportunity

Brands spend heavily on awareness but struggle to turn that attention into genuine engagement. Pryzebox offered a different model — a platform where brands could run contests and giveaways, giving users real chances to win products they actually wanted, while brands earned authentic enthusiasm in return. The vision was ambitious: a multi-surface platform spanning a consumer mobile app on iOS and Android, a Shopify-integrated brand layer, a separate business management portal, and a real-time contest experience that kept users coming back. We were brought in to build all of it.

Approach

We led the engineering effort as a team of six, with full responsibility for architecture, delivery, code quality, and cloud infrastructure across every surface of the platform. The engagement ran for two years — long enough to take Pryzebox from a simple mobile application to a fully integrated platform with presence on the App Store, Google Play, and Shopify. As Senior Engineer and Team Lead, the role covered everything from requirements analysis and pull request reviews to Azure infrastructure management and CI/CD pipeline development.

Solution

1. Consumer Mobile App (iOS & Android) Built on Xamarin, the mobile app was the primary user-facing surface — contest discovery, campaign participation, prize tracking, leaderboards, real-time updates, and social features including challenges and chat. Firebase handled push notifications and authentication alongside social login via Facebook and Google. 2. Real-Time Contest Engine WebSockets powered live contest updates and real-time leaderboard activity — keeping the experience dynamic and competitive rather than static. 3. Shopify Brand Integration Brands connected their Shopify stores directly to the platform. Products, campaigns, and prize inventory were pulled through the integration, allowing brands to run contests tied to their real product catalogue without manual duplication. 4. ASP.NET Core Web Service The core backend powering the mobile app — REST API, JWT authentication, scheduled jobs, push notifications via AWS Pinpoint, deep linking via Branch.io, PayPal payment processing, and integrations with Podio and Zoho for business operations. 5. Business Management Portal A separate web application for internal platform management — built on ASP.NET Core with a PostgreSQL database, giving the team full control over campaigns, brands, users, contests, memberships, reporting, and platform configuration. 6. Azure Cloud Infrastructure The entire infrastructure ran on Azure — Blob Storage for media, CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments, and a cloud architecture designed for scalability and reliability across all platform surfaces.

Technical Highlights

1. Multi-Surface Platform Architecture A single coherent product spanning Xamarin mobile, an ASP.NET Core API, a separate management portal, and a Shopify integration layer — all designed and delivered by a team of six over two years. 2. Shopify Product & Campaign Integration Brands connected their Shopify catalogues directly to the platform, enabling contest creation tied to real inventory without manual data entry or duplication. 3. Real-Time Contest Experience WebSockets kept contest state, leaderboards, and activity feeds live across all connected users — making the experience feel immediate rather than page-refresh driven. 4. Azure Infrastructure & CI/CD Ownership Full ownership of the Azure cloud environment — storage, deployment pipelines, environment configuration, and release automation maintained across the entire engagement.

Impact

Over two years, Pryzebox grew from a simple mobile app into a fully integrated multi-surface platform — live on the App Store, Google Play, and Shopify, with real brands running real campaigns and users winning real prizes. The project was a genuinely rewarding engineering and leadership experience. Working with Corey and the team at Vivomi, we built something technically ambitious and commercially meaningful. Pryzebox was ultimately self-funded, and like many early-stage startups, it faced the realities of sustaining growth without external investment. The platform was taken down following the decision to cease operations — but the scale of what was built in two years, by a team of six, remains one of the strongest examples of our full-platform delivery capability.

Deployment

Pryzebox was available on the App Store, Google Play, and Shopify. The platform has since been discontinued.

Testimonial

Corey Williams

CEO at Vivomi Inc.

“I cannot say enough about AitchSoft and my experience working with them. They were so much more than contributors to our project — they became part of the team. I want to express many things to affirm their abilities and work ethic, but I know they would not do it justice. If you find yourself in need of a team with their abilities, you will not regret it. I would hire them again in an instant. Thank you AitchSoft for all that you provided to our team!”