Bookvoice

TapeTales had already developed a mobile app in Flutter, making it the natural choice for rebuilding Bookvoice's experience. We redesigned the app to reflect Bookvoice's brand and connected it to the existing Mobile App Backend APIs.

The bigger challenge was solving the account fragmentation problem. Shopify required its own authentication system and did not allow custom APIs for accounts. For privacy reasons, we could not use existing user passwords from the Mobile App Backend (MAB) to create new Shopify accounts.

The options were limited.

• Force customers to create a second Shopify account while keeping their MAB account, which would repeat past mistakes of duplicate accounts and broken user journeys.
• Design a new approach.

We chose the latter.

By implementing passwordless authentication across both Shopify and the mobile app, users could log in seamlessly with email verification. While this solution did not technically unify accounts between Shopify and Medialib, it eliminated mismatched emails—the root cause of lost orders. The result was a seamless experience for customers without requiring them to recreate accounts.

As Bookvoice prepared to expand beyond à la carte purchases and launch subscription plans, it became clear that the existing infrastructure could not support this shift. Developing subscriptions on top of the fragmented system would have been costly, time-consuming, and would still deliver a compromised customer experience.

The solution was to build a single, unified backend system to replace the three systems we had been relying on:

• Shopify Admin
• Backend 1
• Mobile App Backend

This meant fully decommissioning Shopify—a major but necessary step.

We hired an in-house backend developer and began building a system capable of handling the entire Bookvoice ecosystem. Its responsibilities included:

• Authentication: One unified account with User, Admin, and Partner roles with secure access control.
• Product information: Structured attributes such as categories, authors, narrators, and publishers.
• Content delivery: Streaming and downloading of audiobooks.
• Payments and billing: Support for à la carte purchases, credit-based transactions, and unlimited listening subscription plans.
• User-facing APIs: Enabling the app and website experience with endpoints for home page, product discovery, filters etc.
• Admin APIs: Tools for audiobook uploads and management.
• Commission calculation: Automated commission calculations across all purchase models and revenue share.
• Business analytics: Centralized data for tracking performance and decision-making.

This unified backend became the foundation for scaling Bookvoice's product offering without the technical debt and inefficiencies of the old infrastructure.

To make this transition possible, we brought all product development in-house. With a lean team of just one part-time full stack developer leading engineering, one full-time backend developer, and myself leading product management and design, we built the new system from the ground up in just under 5 months. This small but focused setup allowed us to move quickly, avoid the inefficiencies of outsourcing, and ensure that every technical decision was aligned with product and customer needs.

The final piece of the puzzle was building a fully custom website. The old Shopify-based setup had been a constant source of limitations—both technically and from a customer experience perspective. To support Bookvoice's new subscription offerings alongside à la carte purchases, we needed a platform that could handle both seamlessly.

We completely redesigned the website with two main goals:

• Flexible commerce system – allowing users to purchase individual audiobooks, subscribe to unlimited listening plans, or manage their credits from a single account.
• Streamlined user experience – reducing friction in discovery, checkout, and account management while reflecting Bookvoice's refreshed brand identity.

The new site was tightly integrated with our unified backend, which enabled:

• Real-time account and order synchronization between web and mobile.
• A modern subscription billing flow with self-service features such as plan upgrades and cancellations.
• A scalable foundation for future product launches without relying on third-party "hacks" or plugins.

This shift gave Bookvoice complete control over its digital storefront for the first time, ensuring that the website could evolve in step with the company's strategy rather than being constrained by external platforms.

The night between July 31st and August 1st marked the most critical moment of the transformation. We had to replace three fragmented systems—Shopify Admin, Backend 1, and the Mobile App Backend—with a single unified backend, while simultaneously launching a redesigned, custom website, a major mobile app update, and migrating all infrastructure from the agency's unstable servers to Microsoft Azure.

This was a true "big bang" release. In preparation, we created detailed migration plans for data, user accounts, products, and orders, running multiple dry runs to ensure nothing was lost in transition. On launch night, we carefully shut down each legacy service, migrated databases, re-routed APIs, and brought the new backend online. Once stable, we rolled out the new mobile app update and website in parallel, fully integrated with the new system.

By morning, Bookvoice was running entirely on its new foundation. The migration not only eliminated years of accumulated technical debt but also proved that with a lean team and disciplined execution, we could deliver a seamless transition at massive scale—with zero disruption to customers.