How to Make an App Like Remo

Virtual events used to mean a grid of muted faces and a chat box nobody read. Remo changed that conversation by recreating the feel of a real venue — floor plans, tables, and the freedom to walk over and join a conversation instead of waiting to be assigned to a breakout room.

If you're planning to build something similar, this guide walks through what Remo actually does under the hood, the features you'll need, the tech stack decisions that matter, and what it realistically takes to ship.

What Is Remo and Why Does It Work?

Remo is a virtual events platform built around a map-based interface. Instead of dropping everyone into a single video call, Remo gives attendees a top-down view of a virtual floor with tables. You click a table, you join the conversation happening at it. You leave, you walk somewhere else.

That single interaction — self-directed movement between conversations — is the product. Everything else (presentation mode, sponsor booths, networking timers, analytics) is built around it.

Understanding this matters because it tells you where to spend your engineering budget. A clone that nails video quality but makes table-hopping feel clunky has missed the point entirely.

Who Uses Platforms Like This?

• Conference organizers running multi-track events with networking blocks
• Universities and alumni associations hosting career fairs and reunions
• Corporate teams running all-hands meetings, onboarding, and remote culture events
• Community managers hosting recurring meetups
• Trade show operators selling virtual booth space to sponsors

Each of these segments wants slightly different things, which is worth keeping in mind when you scope your MVP.

Core Features Your Remo Alternative Needs

1. The Virtual Floor Plan

This is your signature feature. Users see a visual map — an office, a rooftop bar, a conference hall — populated with tables that display seat count and current occupants.

What you need to get right:

• Multi-floor navigation so large events don't feel cramped
• Real-time occupancy indicators showing who's sitting where before you commit to joining
• Custom floor plan uploads so enterprise clients can brand their venue
• Capacity limits per table (4–8 seats is the sweet spot for conversation)

2. Video Conferencing Engine

Each table is essentially its own video room. When a user clicks a table, they need to be connected within a couple of seconds — anything slower breaks the illusion of walking across a room.

Key requirements:

• WebRTC-based peer connections with an SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit) for scale
• Adaptive bitrate so weak connections degrade gracefully instead of dropping
• Screen sharing at the table level
• Camera and mic controls, virtual backgrounds, noise suppression
• Fast room switching without full teardown and reconnect

3. Presentation Mode

Organizers need to pull everyone out of their tables and onto a shared stage for keynotes, then release them back. This is a state change broadcast to every connected client simultaneously.

Include:

• Speaker spotlight with multiple presenters on stage
• Slide and screen sharing to the full audience
• Audience Q&A queue with upvoting
• Live polls and reaction emojis
• Automatic return-to-table when the session ends

4. Networking and Discovery Tools

• Attendee directory with searchable profiles, job titles, and interests
• Business card exchange or contact sharing
• Direct messaging between attendees
• Speed networking mode with timed rotations
• Interest-based table suggestions to help shy attendees find their people

5. Event Management Dashboard

Organizers are your paying customers, so this needs to be genuinely good:

• Event creation with scheduling, time zones, and registration links
• Ticketing and payment integration
• Attendee import via CSV, plus CRM sync
• Email invitations and automated reminders
• Moderation tools — mute, remove, ban
• Post-event analytics: attendance duration, table hopping patterns, engagement scores

6. Sponsor and Monetization Features

• Branded sponsor booths placed on the floor plan
• Banner placements and lobby takeovers
• Lead capture forms at booths
• Sponsor-specific analytics reports

The Technical Architecture

Real-Time Video Infrastructure

You have two realistic paths:

Use a managed provider. Agora, Daily.co, LiveKit Cloud, Twilio Video, or 100ms handle the hard parts — global edge servers, codec negotiation, NAT traversal. You ship faster and your video quality is good on day one. You pay per participant-minute, which gets expensive at scale but is predictable early on.

Self-host an SFU. LiveKit, Janus, or mediasoup running on your own infrastructure. Dramatically cheaper at volume, but you're now responsible for autoscaling media servers, managing TURN relays, and debugging packet loss at 2 AM.

Recommendation: start managed, plan your abstraction layer so you can migrate later. Almost every successful platform in this space did exactly that.

Presence and State Synchronization

The floor plan needs to reflect reality instantly. When someone sits down at Table 7, every other attendee viewing that floor should see it immediately.

Use WebSockets (Socket.IO, or a managed service like Ably or Pusher) backed by Redis for presence state. Redis pub/sub handles fan-out across server instances, and Redis sorted sets work well for tracking table occupancy with TTL-based cleanup for ghost sessions.

Be careful here: presence bugs are the most common complaint about platforms like this. A table that shows four people but actually has zero is worse than no indicator at all.

Backend Stack

• API layer: Node.js with NestJS, or Go if you expect heavy concurrency
• Database: PostgreSQL for events, users, registrations, and analytics
• Cache and presence: Redis
• Queue: BullMQ or RabbitMQ for email sends, recording processing, report generation
• Storage: S3 or equivalent for recordings, floor plan assets, and uploads
• Search: Elasticsearch or Postgres full-text for the attendee directory

Frontend Stack

• Web: React or Next.js — this is a desktop-first product, and the web is where it lives
• Floor plan rendering: Canvas via Konva.js, or PixiJS if you want richer animation. SVG works for simpler layouts but struggles past a few hundred elements
• State: Zustand or Redux Toolkit, with careful separation between server state and real-time socket state
• Mobile: React Native or Flutter for a companion app, though be honest with yourself — mobile is a secondary experience for this category

Infrastructure

Deploy on AWS, GCP, or Azure with Kubernetes for orchestration. Media servers need to be geographically distributed — a European attendee routed through a US-East SFU will have a noticeably worse call. Plan for regional deployment early, because retrofitting it is painful.

Development Roadmap

Phase 1: Discovery and Design (3–5 weeks)

Competitive analysis, user interviews with event organizers, feature prioritization, wireframes, and a clickable prototype. Get the floor plan interaction in front of real users before you write production code.

Phase 2: Core Build (10–16 weeks)

Authentication, event creation, the floor plan renderer, video integration, table joining, and basic organizer controls. This is your MVP — a host can create an event, invite people, and attendees can move between tables and talk.

Phase 3: Engagement Layer (6–10 weeks)

Presentation mode, chat, polls, Q&A, attendee directory, and messaging.

Phase 4: Monetization and Analytics (4–8 weeks)

Ticketing, payments, sponsor booths, lead capture, and the analytics dashboard.

Phase 5: Scale Testing and Launch (4–6 weeks)

Load testing with simulated attendees, media server tuning, security audit, accessibility review, and a soft launch with friendly customers.

Cost Expectations

Costs vary widely by region and team composition, but a rough shape:

Scope	Timeline	Typical Range
MVP — floor plan, video, basic events	3–4 months	$60,000 – $110,000
Full platform — engagement, monetization, analytics	6–9 months	$130,000 – $250,000
Enterprise grade — white label, SSO, compliance, custom venues	10–14 months	$250,000 – $450,000+

Don't forget ongoing costs. Video infrastructure alone can run $0.001–$0.004 per participant-minute with a managed provider. A 500-person, three-hour event is roughly 90,000 participant-minutes. Model this against your pricing before you set it.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Treating it like a Zoom clone. The value is the spatial experience. If your floor plan feels like decoration bolted onto a video call, users will just use Zoom.

Underestimating presence complexity. Users refresh pages, lose connections, and close laptops mid-conversation. Your presence system needs aggressive heartbeats and cleanup, or your floor plan will fill with phantom attendees.

Skipping load testing. A platform that works beautifully with 20 testers can collapse at 400 concurrent users. Simulate real load with headless clients before a customer does it for you.

Ignoring the organizer experience. Attendees use your product once. Organizers use it every week and decide whether to renew. Their dashboard deserves as much polish as the event floor.

Building mobile-first. Tempting, but wrong for this category. People attend virtual conferences from laptops. Ship an excellent web app, then add mobile.

How to Differentiate

Remo owns the general-purpose virtual venue space. Competing head-on is expensive. Better angles:

• Vertical focus — a platform built specifically for academic conferences, recruiting fairs, or healthcare CME with the compliance and workflows those niches demand
• AI-powered matchmaking — suggest which table an attendee should join based on their profile and goals
• Hybrid-first design — genuinely good tooling for events where half the audience is in a physical room
• Deep integrations — native connections to Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and LMS platforms
• Better pricing model — per-event pricing instead of annual seats appeals to occasional organizers

Final Thoughts

Building an app like Remo is a real engineering project — real-time video at scale, synchronized presence, and a spatial interface that has to feel effortless. But the market is proven, the problem is understood, and the tooling available today is far better than it was when Remo launched.

Start narrow. Pick one type of event and one type of organizer, build the floor plan experience until it feels genuinely good, and expand from there. The platforms that win in this space aren't the ones with the longest feature list — they're the ones where joining a table feels exactly like walking up to a group of people.

Have a project in mind? Contact Sodio Technologies to discuss your requirements and explore the right technology solution for your business.