Workman

The challenge

Finding a reliable plumber, electrician or carpenter still runs on word of mouth. Customers cannot tell competence from confidence, and skilled tradespeople with no marketing budget stay invisible regardless of how good their work is. Both sides lose to the same information gap.

Our approach

We built for the harder half of the market first: the professionals. If the tools do not fit how a tradesperson actually works — on site, one hand free, patchy signal — they never adopt it, and a marketplace with no supply has nothing to sell. Everything in the app assumes intermittent connectivity and one-handed use.

The constraints

Tradespeople work on site, often one-handed and frequently out of signal. Every action in the app had to survive losing connectivity mid-task and reconcile cleanly afterwards, which shaped the data model far more than any screen did.

What we built

• Professional profiles built around verified skills and completed work rather than self-description
• Location-aware matching that ranks by proximity and availability together
• Realtime job status both sides can see, so neither has to chase the other for an update
• Offline-first job handling that queues actions and reconciles when signal returns
• In-app messaging with the job’s context attached
• A review flow that only opens once a job is actually marked complete