Padfixer is an on-demand home services platform that connects people with home improvement and maintenance experts in their local area.

The Challenge

Technology is redefining how we interact with service-based businesses — none more so than the on-demand home services sector.

A consortium of seasoned entrepreneurs from Australia joined forces to tackle an age-old problem: How to find and hire the best local tradespeople.

The entrepreneurs acknowledged that while there are various on-demand home services platforms in the market, very few hit the mark - their services were either over-priced or difficult to use.

The group saw this as a golden opportunity to build a better service with fairer pricing.

Padfixer was born.

Our Approach

We met up with William Lance, the consortium lead, to thrash-out the product requirements.

Tradespeople and customers were invited to a week-long workshop to help us understand the target audience of Padfixer. Personas and customer journey maps were created with the sole purpose of creating a better User Experience (UX).

One of the great things about running UX workshops is that the team was able to come up with a prototype of the final product without writing a line of code.

The best part of working with Elastic Teams was their unflagging leadership — they fully understood what we wanted to achieve and took it to the next level. It would be hard to hire Elastic Teams and come out with something that wasn't well thought-out.

William Lance, Co-Founder, Padfixer William Lance, Co-Founder, Padfixer

In collaboration with the client, our in-house marketing team came up with the Padfixer brand name, logo, colour palette, brand guidelines and other digital marketing collateral.

Padfixer app

The Solution

The Team

A team of highly-skilled User Interface (UI) designers and software engineers was formed to tackle the product requirements. The six-person team consisted of:

  • An experienced Project Manager practising Agile software development
  • An experienced UI designer working on the creation of interactive wireframes and high-resolution mockups for both the marketing website and the mobile apps
  • Senior software engineer working on a GraphQL-backend API (Application Programming Interface)
  • Mobile app developer assigned to the production of the customer-facing app
  • Mobile app developer assigned to tradesperson app
  • Full-stack developer working on the production of the marketing website

Technology Stack

All start-ups need to get their product to market as quickly as possible when you consider cash burn rates. To accelerate the development process, we chose the Ruby on Rails framework for developing the core business functions of Padfixer.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was chosen to power the backbone of Padfixer. AWS is very robust, versatile and provides a pricing model that is well suited to start-ups like Padfixer.

Summary of technology stack:

  • Ruby on Rails GraphQL API backed by PostgreSQL
  • AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances
  • Mobile applications built using React Native (iOS and Android)

AWS services used:

  • Relational Database Service (RDS) for data management (PostgresSQL)
  • Simple Notification Service (SNS) for mobile push notifications
  • Simple Email Service (SES) for email management
  • ElastiCache for API response caching
  • Simple Queue Service (SQS) for job matching and scheduling
  • Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributed traffic management

The Outcome

Padfixer was designed, built and launched by Elastic Teams, on-time and within budget.

Thousands of home service jobs are posted on Padfixer every month.

We have seen very very rapid growth. Elastic Teams is part of all those discussions about where do we go from here, not just from a product standpoint but how do we grow the business.

William Lance, Co-Founder, Padfixer William Lance, Co-Founder, Padfixer

Padfixer continues to retain the services of Elastic Teams in the form of a trusted, long-term engagement.