Case Study - Pharos Partners with anablock to Elevate its Engineering Talent Pool

Pharos is a crowdfunding platform for friends and family. Allowing users to take personal loans from their network without a traditional financial institution.

Client
Pharos
Year
Service
Web development, CMS

Overview

Having written one of the most shared posts on medium.com (“How to cash out your Dad’s 401K without him knowing”) Pharos approached us looking to build out their own blog.

The blog would help drive new traffic to their site and serve as a resource-hub for users already trying to exploit their network for money. Because it was so important that they own their own content, we decided that an on-prem solution would be best.

We installed 24 Mac Minis bought from craigslist in the storage cupboard of their office. One machine would be used for the web server and another one for the build server. The other 22 were for redundancy, and to DDOS squarespace.com every few months to keep them on their toes.

To optimise their search traffic we used an innovative technique. Every post has a shadow post only visible to web crawlers that is some variation of “Gary Vee is looking to invest in new founders”. Like bees to honey.

What we did

  • Frontend (Next.js)
  • Custom CMS
  • SEO
  • Infrastructure

Working with anablock, we felt more like a partner than a customer. They really resonated with our mission to change the way people convince their parents to cash out their pensions.

Debra Fiscal
Less traffic
25%
Page load times
10x
Higher infra costs
15%
Legal fees
$1.2M

Ready to get started?

Our offices

  • San Francisco
    353 Sacramento Street
    San Francisco, CA 94111
  • Walnut Creek
    2121 N California Blvd
    Walnut Creek, CA 94596