A team at Scaphold built a real-time GraphQL API using Apollo's subscription protocol to provide powerful features like live updates and efficient data retrieval. They leveraged the pubsub protocol and Apollo's SubscriptionManager class to simplify the logic of maintaining subscriptions, allowing them to focus on building their application rather than managing infrastructure. The setup functions abstract away complexities of pubsub systems, making it easier to manage channels and filters for each subscription. By using Apollo tools, Scaphold was able to rapidly build a real-time API that powers their applications and provides a scalable infrastructure for managing schema migrations and updates.