CASE STUDY

hipages: Creating a seamless digital experience for tradies on the go

Transforming the Tradiecore product across multiple mobile platforms.

At a glance

DiUS partnered with hipages to take a product management approach across the expansion of its Tradiecore application, which enables tradies to quote, invoice and schedule jobs on the go. DiUS also led the delivery of a fully featured Android version of Tradiecore using the same codebase as the iOS version, enabling delivery in only six weeks.

Our services:

Meet hipages

h ipages is Australia’s largest online marketplace for tradies, connecting homeowners and businesses with trusted tradespeople. One job is posted every 20 seconds on hipages and it is now used by 3 million people.

By posting a job on the platform, customers are matched with local trusted tradies, enabling them to review profiles and compare quotes, before hiring the right person for the job. The platform also helps local tradies get quality job leads and grow their business.

The challenge

Easing the burden of everyday admin for trade businesses

As part of a vision to create seamless digital experiences for tradies, hipages launched the Tradiecore mobile app to ease the burden of everyday admin for sole traders and small business owners. Using their smartphone, tradies can send quotes and invoices, save time on appointments and scheduling, and connect to the main hipages app to monitor leads for new jobs.

The Tradiecore platform is mobile-first, which is a unique selling point that sets it apart from competitors. With a target market of tradies who spend most of their time on work sites armed only with tools and a phone, the Tradiecore team recognised that a functional and reliable mobile experience was paramount.

So, shortly after the application build had started, hipages wanted to accelerate the progress of discovery and delivery with product lifecycle support and capability uplift.

What we did

A startup approach inside a mature organisation

With the Tradiecore product at an early stage of development, there was a need to take a lean startup approach to product delivery. This is where DiUS’ experience of helping enterprise startups scale through growth periods was invaluable.

Embedded within the Tradiecore team, DiUS was able to contribute to key outcomes and solutions including:

Refined ways of working suitable for a startup-style product.
Uplifted a cross-functional team culture.
Increased rate of delivery.
Reduced friction to acquiring more customers and increased engagement within the app.
Improved the approach for opportunity assessments to ensure the right features were prioritised for delivery, to deliver higher value for customers.
Strategically planned the product roadmap to achieve product-market-fit.

Cross platform mobile frameworks

Tradiecore was initially launched exclusively on iOS using the React Native cross-platform framework. But, with one-third of the target market being Android users, it was critical to release an Android version as soon as possible.

With the existing iOS app built using React Native, this presented the team with the opportunity to build a fully featured Android app from the same codebase with minor additional effort. In fact, the initial Android version of Tradiecore was built and ready for testing in six weeks.

While the speed of development and delivery was important, so too was the app’s functionality and stability. Based on a single common code base, the Android app was launched with full feature parity with the iOS app.

DiUS’ approach to mobile app development also helped to establish:

Additions to the CI/CD build pipeline to support automated testing and deployment of the Android app to Google Play.
Common end-to-end testing framework to allow integration testing of both Android and iOS apps ie. write-once tests for both platforms.
A regular release cadence for both iOS and Android versions of the app to maintain feature parity.
Uplifting the Tradiecore development, design and product teams to ensure both Android and iOS versions of the app were of the highest quality.

Results for hipages

A new tool for tradies that is growing rapidly

By the end of FY22, over 15,000 jobs had been created within Tradiecore; 86% of job volume is via hipages lead integration while the remaining were manually created from other sources.

Through a re-prioritisation of the product roadmap, customer acquisition channels were significantly expanded to improve growth. By utilising these channels, along with cross-selling to the existing hipages user base, Tradiecore exceeded its customer target by 35% with minimal marketing spend.

Thanks to internal showcases, the speed and quality of Tradiecore’s progress has not gone unnoticed. Other digital products at hipages are looking to replicate the tech stack for Tradiecore, chosen for its flexibility and speed of delivering new features without compromising quality.

A new end-to-end testing framework was written to replace the team’s current end-to-end testing, moving from a platform-focused approach, to a user interaction-based framework. The team has adopted the new end-to-end testing framework for all new work and has begun to migrate the older tests, building the team’s confidence in the product and maintaining feature parity across platforms.