Clover made their product multiplayer in less than a day using Liveblocks

Challenge

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 real‑time collaborative infrastructure in-house is extremely difficult and time-consuming. Clover needed a third-party solution to help them turn their product into a real‑time multiplayer experience without spending months of engineering time away from their core offering.

Solution

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.

Results

Clover now offers a true real‑time 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 real‑time 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.

Tom GiannattasioCo-founder and CEO at Clover