Case Study - The Operating System for a Bicycle Shop

About

Cykel set out to revolutionize the bicycle shop operations experience by creating a unified platform that includes a robust dashboard and mobile applications for both iOS and Android. The objective was to offer bicycle shops with an integrated solution to manage service bookings, rental bookings for their customers and general inventory management.

Challenge

The cykel team approached us to build them a SaaS solution that would support bicycle shops operations through a CRM dashboard and customers through iOS and Android mobile apps.

cykel faced several key challenges:

• Seamless user experience. The user experience for both the CRM and the mobile apps had to be intuitive, consistent, accessible for the users.
• Multi-tenancy. The platform had to serve multiple bicycle shops with isolation of all data, including customer data.
• A Unified Platform. The platform had to be cohesive and integrated with a CRM and mobile applications for a seamless user experience.
• Cloud Hosting. cykel did not have a tech team to maintain the infrastructure and wanted a cloud solution that would scale up and down depending on usage.
• Secure Payment. Self checkout integration through Telr for the mobile app users to pay for service or rental bookings.

Solution

The cykel team already had the brand guidelines and mobile apps designs. We designed the User Experience and User Interfaces for the CRM and other components of the dashboards.

We set up project management on Trello with epics and user stories for each of the tasks. We decided to go with AWS for cloud hosting on Elastic Beanstalk with auto-scaling. We partnered with Telr for a secure self-checkout payment solution.

The outcome was a successful launch of cykel as a hub for bicycle shop operators offering a CRM dashboard for operations and iOS and Android mobile app for bicycle shop customers to book servicing and rent bicycles.

Technologies

• Infrastructure. Terraform - AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS RDS, etc.
• CI/CD. Github, AWS CodePipeline, Fastlane.
• Backend. PHP (Laravel).
• Frontend. React.
• Mobile. React Native.

What we did