[Case study]

Community Gearbox

Native mobile app

Built in six weeks, then published by the founder as an early web app version.

[Stack]

Flutter, Firebase, Figma, Notion

[Duration]

6 weeks

[What it is]

Sharing gear with people you already know

Community Gearbox is a social platform for sharing gear with people you already know: friends, families, clubs and groups. Founder and CEO Dante Garcia asked us to rebuild an early prototype so more people could use and test it. In six weeks we helped narrow the feature set to the key hypothesis he was testing and built a two-sided Flutter app where members lend, borrow and request items inside their own circles and community managers run the groups; Dante then published an early web app version that people could click through.

The problem

Friends, families and clubs already share tents, tools and camera gear. Community Gearbox’s own site sums up the problem as too many “wait… who has the tent?” moments. The company, made in Seattle and the Bay Area, builds for sharing inside circles where trust already exists. It is not a rental shop or a listings site for strangers.

That meant the product needed a social filter at its core: what you can see and borrow depends on who you know and which groups you belong to. Before any of it could be built, the idea needed a clear scope, with every feature written down and ranked.

[How it works]

Four stages over six weeks

We ran the project in four stages over six weeks, from strategy to launch.

Phase 1: Strategy

A prioritized product roadmap in Notion, with user flows, a sitemap, unit tests and specced features

Phase 2: Wireframing and architecture

Consulted on Dante’s front-end designs so the interface covered every specced feature
Designed the database architecture in Firebase

Phase 3: Beta

Built every screen, switched on every feature and connected the front end to the back end

Phase 4: Launch

Polished the interface and fixed the bugs found in QA

What shipped

User type: Member

Create and personalize a profile
Search for and join groups
Find and add friends, and message other members directly
Post comments to groups
Explore, search and filter items
Add items to share and create collections of items
Request someone else’s item, or lend one out

User type: Community manager

Create a group and invite people to it
Manage group members
Add items and collections to a group
Set who can see each item, and who can see the group

Requests are built around the handoff. The item request screen asks when the borrower wants to use the item, as a date range, and who will pick it up and return it.

Stack

Community Gearbox is a Flutter app on Firebase. We planned the roadmap, flows and specs in Notion and worked through the designs in Figma. Flutter also builds for the web, and the early version Dante published was a web app.

Timeline

Six weeks end to end, in 2022: strategy, then wireframing and architecture, then a beta build, then launch polish and QA fixes.

Outcome

Dante published an early web app version of Community Gearbox that people could click through. In his Clutch review he also called us great project managers who kept the project within scope and on time.

In the 2022 app screens shown on this page, the home screen opens with the line “together we have so much”. The same line still heads communitygearbox.com today.

[Don’t just take our word for it]