"And the winner ist ..." – How we pulled off a €10 million furniture giveaway!

I'm Alexander and I work as a software developer at CHECK24 Möbel in Berlin. Depending on the project, I take on tasks in the frontend, backend, or even DevOps. I've been at CHECK24 for a little over three years now. I started as a working student, then did my mandatory internship here, followed by my bachelor’s thesis. I’ve been a full-time employee for one and a half years now.

And I'm Nathan, also a full stack developer in the Berlin Möbel team. In addition to frontend and backend, I’m also involved in DevOps and infrastructure topics. I joined CHECK24 at the end of 2022, right after finishing my master's degree.

After the successful marketing campaign in 2024, where CHECK24 gave away football jerseys, we wanted to launch a similar campaign at CHECK24 Möbel – aiming to raise awareness of our product and furniture selection. That’s how the idea came up: "CHECK24 gives away furniture worth 10 million euros!"

More specifically, from April 1 to 24, furniture items were given away daily via the CHECK24 app – over 100,000 in total. It worked on a "first come, first served" basis. Anyone who clicked the “Join the queue” button in the app at exactly 12:00 had a chance to win a free furniture item.

Our main goal was to show that CHECK24 isn’t just for comparing things like electricity plans – we also offer millions of furniture items!

Our core team initially consisted of eight developers, three product managers, one managing director, and one CEO. But of course, many more were involved – like the team handling product shipping.

The project was special in terms of scope, too: a large budget, high expected traffic, and an ambitious deadline. That influenced our software design – we had to think in scalable ways and find pragmatic solutions, sometimes relying more on budget than on time. This made the team dynamic particularly exciting.

What went really well was that we were able to build the system from scratch – and I got to use Go in the backend for the first time, which was technically exciting.
Also, the team collaboration was great. I'm proud that the system ran stable, with only a few minor issues.

The tight timeline was the biggest challenge: after just two months, the frontend went live, including features like “favorite products,” push notifications, and the participation itself. Technically, our frontend setup kept challenging us. Our team wasn’t very familiar with the loader/action model, so we had to figure out a lot of the data flow — which made us even more proud of the final result!

I agree. On top of that, the campaign page didn’t just work technically – it was also customer-friendly, with animations and effects.
What didn’t go so smoothly was the first campaign day. If you were in the virtual queue right at 12:00 that day, you know what I mean.
Despite previous testing, we went live with too few resources and weak error handling. So the whole team came together after the first giveaway round and optimized everything – and thankfully, that paid off in the following days.

For me, it was a great opportunity to learn new technical things. As mentioned, I worked with Go for the first time – a very exciting experience. I also got much more hands-on with AWS than usual. Experiencing this range in practice was really educational.

AWS was a big topic for me too. We hosted the entire infrastructure there and learned a lot about the platform.
What inspired me most: when you optimize a process that will affect over 250,000 people the next day – and everything has to work to the second – your quality standards rise automatically. That’s incredibly motivating, and when everything runs smoothly, it’s a fantastic feeling.

I had two big highlights. First, the second day after the rocky launch – it was amazing to see how much passion, commitment, and team spirit went into fixing the technical issues. It felt great to see all the effort pay off.
Second, I loved how many people posted in forums and on social media about their free furniture – that really showed how excited our customers were about the campaign.

My personal highlight was when we discovered and quickly solved a problem: many users reached the checkout with their gifts but didn’t complete the purchase.
At first, we thought it was a system error between the queue and checkout. But then we realized many bots had entered the queue – and weren’t programmed to complete the purchase. We activated some prepared anti-bot measures and resolved the issue quickly. That was a real success moment for me!