Ever notice that no matter how hard you work, or “honey do” lists you conquer, there are always a few chores around the house that really need to be done? That storm knocked down those trees the other day- those will need to be turned into firewood. That new TV would be great mounted on the wall. The dog needs a hair trim, and the fireplace really needs to be cleaned out. Really your whole living room needs a deep cleaning. And maybe another coat of paint…
Make Time
Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it all yourself! Download the Takl mobile application, an on-demand home services platform, and request some help! Providers are background-checked, user-rated, and paid for through the Takl application. They can arrive in under an hour or you can schedule them for a time that works for you. There’s no better way to get time back while still getting the chores done.
Make Money
If the season of giving has made your pockets a bit too light, become a Takl provider! With hundreds of different jobs in the system, you can definitely find an in-demand skill in which you excel. Do the jobs you want on a schedule that works for you.
Once Upon A Time
Willis Johnson and Greg McCollum had an idea, some screens sketched out, and a powerpoint. They knew what they were asking for was not easy. They needed design, strategy, and development for both iOS and Android mobile applications as well as an API and web component to manage them. On top of that, it needed to be done- fast. Willis and Greg found exactly what they were looking for: a company that was big enough and had enough experience to get it done. (Spoiler alert- it’s us!)
We worked with the Takl team to plan out an initial scope of work to get an effective minimum viable product to be released in their 6-month time frame. With our strategy and design team and approximately 8 mobile and web developers, we began in January and finished the initial scope of work a month early. Takl was then able to get in some additional features for their July release to the greater Nashville area.
Technical Obstacles
While we normally develop first for one platform and then have it to reference while we build the second, having a tight deadline meant creating an application for both iOS and Android platforms simultaneously. When decisions on fine details needed making, the teams had to work together to keep the user experience aligned. The iOS and Android teams demonstrated excellent communication skills so that the applications kept feature parity and each platform conformed to the industry’s design standards and best practices.
Your final product will never perfectly match up to your initial roadmap, user stories, and acceptance tests. Something always changes. In Takl’s case, the implementation of the While You’re At It feature shook up how a chore was defined and recognized. Chores were assumed to have a set of specific parameters and code had to be refactored and adjusted in order to support the new user-created ones. Even with this change, our experience and process kept us on track to be able to easily adjust and make the next deadline.
If you’ve lived someplace like California and then moved to Tennessee, you know that prices can be very different depending on your location. Our developers used the PostGIS database extension to map out regions so that we could allow pricing to be tied to location. This has made it easier for Takl to expand into new geographical areas.
In the Takl mobile app, the customer can view a live map of the provider as the provider drives to the job location. To take pressure off of the rest of the API, we built a small Phoenix app that handles the transmission of the latitude/longitude from the provider to the customer. This was also done to play to the strengths of the Phoenix framework, as our infrastructure was not setup to support a large number of websockets with Ruby on Rails (on which the rest of the APIs and web portion were built).
Where Are They Now?
The Takl team knows that in order to keep up in the technology world, you must always listen to your users and constantly iterate and improve. Our analytics data has shown that some users were challenged to locate the chore they want done in the menu, so we are worked to optimize process.
Today, more than 40,000 Takl providers service over 75 cities and metropolitan areas across the United States. Customers can book chores 7 days a week, on-demand, same-day or for a future date through a web portal or Takl’s free mobile app.
“Metova has been an outstanding partner for Takl. They helped us get up and running quickly in the beginning and got us to launch with an incredibly solid minimal viable product last summer. I’ve always been impressed with their attention to technical quality and their input on product design and usability. I would definitely recommend Metova for anyone looking for high quality software development help in the mobile or web spaces.”
