Clover is a productivity tool that helps people take notes, whiteboard, track
todos, and plan their day in one unified solution. While the Clover team knew
they’ll eventually build a multiplayer product, the first version of their
product was focused on creating a great single-player notetaking and
whiteboarding experience.
As more people started using the product, Clover needed to become inherently
more collaborative to encourage guest collaboration and drive organic user
growth.
Building and maintaining a realtime collaborative infrastructure in‑house is
extremely difficult and time-consuming. Clover needed a third‑party solution to
help them turn their product into a realtime multiplayer experience without
spending months of engineering time away from their core offering.
Because Clover was built with React and Firebase, the data could be easily
refreshed when new updates would come through. The Clover team then used
Liveblocks to add presence to the product so that their users would have a
better idea of who’s in a document and what they’re currently doing. In less
than a day, they built and shipped a live avatar stack, live cursors, and live
selection.
Clover now offers a true realtime multiplayer experience to their users, which
helped increase guest sign-ups and also saved them tens of thousands of dollars
in development and maintenance costs.
“Liveblocks enabled us to add realtime presence to our application in hours instead of weeks and we don’t have to worry about maintenance. This is a no‑brainer for anyone building collaborative experiences.”