Case Study: Dubsmash achieves a rapid relaunch and scalable growth with Heroku

Dubsmash Chooses Heroku Again to Re-Launch Its Video Sharing Service

Dubsmash, a short‑form music and dance video app, rebuilt its product and moved operations from Berlin to New York after its first incarnation—though popular—failed to retain enough users for sustainable growth. The lean new team needed to relaunch quickly, re‑architect the platform for higher retention and scale, and do so without a large DevOps organization.

They chose Heroku again for its simplicity and rapid developer workflow, using Heroku Postgres (with PgBouncer), DynamoDB for simple scalable data, Heroku Pipelines/GitHub integration and review apps for CI/CD, HireFire for autoscaling, and RabbitMQ for event streaming. The result was faster onboarding and deployments, confident rollouts and easy rollbacks, efficient scaling at peak times without dedicated DevOps, and strong organic growth—millions of users and billions of video views.

Dubsmash

Tim Specht

Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer