John and Betty came to us around 2017. Their long-life dream was to create an app that was the go-to place to book horseback riding lessons for kids and adults. For that, the platform needed to link several people: riders who were looking for lessons, professors who taught the lessons, and the farms where those professors would work. In addition, there was a need for another key player… horses!
One of the main challenges was the variety of players in the platform, which lead to the necessity of developing a portal for each of them. Another challenge was that the users weren’t very familiar with technology since it was a business that was traditionally operated by telephone and on paper. At the same time, there was a need for a platform that could work both in desktop-version and mobile-version.
Given that the project required many platforms, and due to the fact that the budget wasn’t enough to build native mobile apps (which would have been ideal), for this MVP we decided with the client that we would create a responsive website. In order to do that, we employed our standard tech stack: Node.js for the back end, and React.js for the front end.
After 5 months of work, we were able to build a super complete MVP, with even more functionalities than those planned at the beginning of the project. Nowadays, HeelsDown has hundreds of farms and 300 trainers, and allows more than 10.000 people to find, book, and attend horseback riding lessons all across America.