Wouldn’t it be great if you could hire yourself reliable temporary employees with only a few sweeps on a smartphone?

Success stories often start from a great idea or realization that sums up the problem that requires solving. From that idea, the process continues by refining the concept and by building the product or service itself.

In this article, we return to the story of our client, Treamer. Treamer is a new age app for mediating on-demand work that gathered over 350 000 € in funding from Invesdor’s public share issue. If we joined in the project now, would we do something differently, though?

Clarifying the idea and planning business operations

Treamer’s and Punos’s collaboration started when Treamer’s CEO Peter Sazonov contacted Punos’s Hannu Alakangas because of a recommendation. The idea of Treamer’s founding team seemed like an immediate hit: a mobile service, that makes it possible for anyone to get extra pairs of hands for a short-term work task.

In fact, instead of just a new app, one could talk about an entirely new service model that had in-built payment of wages, filing of taxes and viewing government official announcements, among other such matters.

Treamer’s team had thought of the concept, service description and user interface a long way ahead. Planning is the cornerstone of a successful product, after all: you should keep in your mind the problem that needs solving, target group, business model and market positioning before typing out the first line of code. It’s strongly in the Punos way of operating to spar the customer’s business concepts before bringing in the technical aspects.

Choosing techniques, the prototype, and the pilot version

Having your service in the planning stage is only worth it up to a certain point: after that, you should give a voice to the customers, the potential users of the service. For Treamer, it was important to get the first version quickly to the hands of the target audience for gathering feedback and suggestions for improvements.

The first Android prototype was completed in a couple of months. Even though all of the features were not in the first version, Treamer’s test group comprised of young users could give vital feedback about the app already in this early stage.

For the prototype’s technology, we chose the so-called native programming language that makes it possible to use all of the available features of the platform, in this case, Android. Choices for native technologies are, among others, HTML5 and React Native. These can be used to develop the software for several platforms all at once.

Behind the scenes: iOS app and the vital web server aspect

Based on the encouraging feedback and experiences about the prototype, together we began to bring Treamer’s service further.

For the iOS version designed for Apple’s iPhones, we decided to go with Apple’s own Swift programming language. After all, Treamer’s app used comparatively challenging animations, sweep functions and map views, so we thought going native to be the best solution for the user experience.

A safe and reliable cloud service is the lifeblood of a modern mobile app and securing the business operations of the company. This cloud hosts all of the vital user information. For Treamer’s so-called back end solution we chose to go with Amazon’s cloud service, Stripe credit card payments and integration to the Palkkaus.fi service. We decided to make it easy for users to register themselves with Facebook’s SDK.

Today’s software products do not operate in a vacuum. Instead, they are supported by other services available on the market. It is the software company’s job to choose the correct additional services for their business while also taking care of being able to reliably integrate these parts into a functional product.

The smooth transition of development work to the team of Treamer

When the service started to take off from the ground, Treamer wanted to grow their own in-house team and recruit additional software developers into their company.

Just like before, Punos also assisted its customer to accomplish this: we helped Treamer to define its skill requirements and recruit the best people for the job from the developer marketplace. The transfer of tasks and related skills to the new employees was naturally made to be as easy as possible.

What could we have done differently?

Experience is the best teacher – even though Punos has experience from several development projects and business fields, we always learn something new, especially with regards to the more innovative projects.

Even with the hindsight of several years, we probably would make the same technological choices, even today. Multi-platform technologies are making fast advancements and yet for Treamer we still would go with Android’s and iOS’s native programming languages. Something to consider for choosing the correct technology is independence: for example, React Native relies on external libraries, so the “ownership of the code” and ability to update are not as strongly in the hands of the development team.

We also learned a lot regarding the teams’ ways of operating and communicating themselves. The service provider has to be able to adjust to the needs of the customer company, either by giving wise advice in the background or with strong leadership in the foreground. Instead of going by procedures and standards set in stone, it’s important to recognize this particular customer organization’s ways of working and conducting its business. In this area, we could have challenged Treamer’s core team more, support their decision-making process more and suggest new ways of doing business.

Best of luck for your world conquering, Treamer!

We are proud of our cooperation with Treamer. Their company is a model example of groundbreaking services and an excellent example of Finnish innovations. The successful crowdfunding round gathered investors from 13 different countries and gave Treamer more speed for conquering the world – one on-demand job at a time.

You can read more about Treamer and hire yourself on-demand workers easily on Treamer’s website.

As Treamer’s business grew, software development has been transferred to their in-house team.

Hannu Alakangas
CEO, Punos Mobile