How Boook Built a Two-Sided Marketplace Software Platform With 3 TrustHiring Engineers

Boook is an early-stage technology startup company based in the United States that operates a two-sided marketplace platform for consumers to reserve event spaces at venue locations within a few clicks. 

They have since expanded their bookings software system technology to be scaled to any type of service business who needs a simple and efficient tool for driving bookings of their professional services time and availability slots. 

With a small initial private angel investment to take their idea and turn it into a fully built, two-sided marketplace platform company for both professional services to be booked by consumers their product road-map and scope of the platform was vast.

Here are the featured highlights of the core product the team at Boook needed to have built into a fully functional software product by a team of engineers:

  • Reservation system for all venues and businesses bookings.
  • Customer management and portal for venues to manage bookings.
  • Messaging portal to communicate with buyer-side consumers.
  • Contracts and agreements system for all reservations.
  • Bidding system for consumers to put proposals into venues.
  • Search listing features and sorting system for consumers to find venues.
  • Business venue profiles with photo and description filters with calendar.
  • Consumer profiles, reservation and proposal management portals.

With the ultimate goal of building the most impactful venue booking software platform online, the Boook executive team knew they needed a world-class team of software development engineers to build their platform to grow and scale for years to come.

Aiming to create the most impactful venue booking software platform online, the Boook executive team recognized the need for a world-class team of software engineers to build a platform that could scale and grow for the long term.

Software Platform Ambitions: Budget challenges to overcome

As most early-stage technology startups face in the product development phase, Boook was in a crossroads of determining how to allocate the minimal capital investment they had to build the best possible software product, while staying within a reasonable budget. 

Most importantly, in the process of building their entire software platform, they knew they needed more than a product, but rather the infrastructure for their engineering team of developers to support the launch and scale of their platform for thousands of customers globally. 

There were a few critical challenges the Boook team grappled with in their pursuit of their marketplace platform software development:

Building a software engineering team, not just a software product. The Boook executive team needed to build a technology infrastructure for executing their platform vision, having software developed needed to be done by full-time hires, not an outside firm one time only and done.

Maximizing the best technology and staying within a tight budget. Risking compromising the quality of the product development to stay within the initial budget available could cause Boook to be built on poor quality technology in a cheaper scope of work cutting critical corners.

Hiring the best engineering team a startup can even afford. Trying to find the top US-based software engineers who are top class additions to a startup company would have far exceeded an initial development budget for even one hire, adding months of build time.

Maintaining the software platform, adding new features, fixes. Once the platform is launched and in the online market with customers and users, ensuring there is an expert stable team supporting it every day is essential to their success.

“My founding team all felt an incredible responsibility from the start in building the best possible software platform using the initial capital we had to make our vision for Boook a reality.

We all knew we wanted to build a team of software engineers for development to join our team for the long run and be invested and not just default to the cheapest budget quote from a firm that won’t be with us past the build-out.

Not only was it a challenge, it became nearly impossible after months of project scopes, quotes and meetings for us to find any top software developers to join our team They were all very unaffordable for us, and we were almost forced to agree on a really limited feature set from an outside firm, risking the entire company.”

– Jenny C., Co-Founder of Boook

Winning Formula: Assembling a world-class and affordable remote software engineering team

From the first time that Jenny and the Boook team reached out to TrustHiring, we immediately connected with their challenge, as we’ve experienced the same hardship in our own companies, and with so many of our other TrustHiring clients. Our team knew we could help have a huge positive impact right away.

Once we began to understand what they were looking for in a software development team of engineers to build the Boook platform, we did a deep dive into their budget limits, signed a contract together, and leveraged both our TrustHiring Matching and Discover platforms to help them assemble a world-class software engineering team.

The TrustHiring team spent the next 7 weeks executing on our TrustHiring 5-Step Placement Process, knowing that the Boook team had a tight timeline needed to start development and ship a first version of their product beta test.

Maximized Quality & Value: 3 remote engineers for less than the cost of 1

Our TrustHiring process delivered a pool of software developer candidate options for the Boook team to evaluate. For their first time in their hiring search, we gave them access to world-class quality software talent, in a cost-effective solution to fit within their budget.

TrustHiring successfully provided Boook with three, full-time software developers who they were able to hire right away to start building their platform and join their remote team, Stephanie, James, and Anna.

“Our founding team to this day still talks about how without TrustHiring finding us Steph, James, & Anna to build our initial platform and software suite for us, Boook would have never been able to stand on the stable ground it is today.

TrustHiring brought us three talented software engineers to join our team, helping us with every step of the process in finding the team members we needed at the most critical time to allocate our capital and get our initial product developed.

Ultimately, overseas and remote hiring has it’s unique differences than in-house, but the harsh reality we had to accept is that we could never afford a US based engineer. Instead, TrustHiring got us three invaluable technical team members, an incredible first product built, for nearly 75% less than what we were going to pay stateside. Our team will forever be grateful for their contributions to Boook”

-Jenny C., Co-Founder of Boook

As a result of the three TrustHiring additions to the Boook team, here were some of the financial and company impacts achieved:

Financial Impact

73%

Decrease in expense for one-year salaries of 3 engineers overseas versus what was quoted for one US-based engineer salary.

58%

Increase in consumer growth in reservation bookings volume.

64%

Increase in venues on-boarded and using Boook for business. 

28%

Of cash on hand saved after all product development expenses.

Company Impact:

In-House Full Salary Engineering Team: Together with their three team members, Boook has successfully assembled a reliable and efficient technology team to manage their platform growth and scale.

Ongoing Dedicated Support & Development: Having three developers all playing a pivotal role in their software product provides full coverage, maintenance and support to users and customers.

Reliable Remote Overseas Staff for Growth: The network effect created by TrustHiring talent now gives Boook major advantages to add more engineers to their team at comparable salaries to scale.

Additional Budget Remaining for Future Needs: The team preserved over 1/4th of their initial capital, got 3x the team additions, and has a dedicated daily team, instead of a one-time build. 

Boook can now flourish with a thriving team of 3 TrustHiring Candidates, and continue focusing on the most important areas of their business in serving their venue booking marketplace of companies and customers every day.

TrustHiring solved their hiring needs within their budget limitations, while still providing the world-class talent the Boook marketplace platform needs to become a world leader in venue and service business bookings for millions in the years to come.

Start TrustHiring at your company today, we can change your future growth too!