Case Study: FiftyThree achieves seamless remix and social-graph experiences with Neo4j

FiftyThree - Customer Case Study

FiftyThree, maker of the iOS sketching app Paper, needed to support rich social and collaboration features—sharing, following, remixing ideas—on a highly interconnected data model that was awkward to model in relational or key-value stores. The team also needed to expose complex remix relationships to users in a way that felt natural and required minimal navigation.

They adopted Neo4j to model and query the graph directly, enabling them to build and return a sorted remix tree on demand without denormalizing or precomputing lists, which improved the user experience and simplified backend logic. Along the way they learned to avoid monolithic user nodes—splitting account, profile and stream data into separate connected nodes to reduce contention and property bloat and improve write performance.

FiftyThree

Aseem Kishore

Developer