When looking for a software developer to create a product like this, certain criteria have to be met because of the bespoke nature of the development process. Openness to implement unique functions, willingness to contribute creative ideas and to accept and experiment with the client’s requests are essential to fulfill the vision stated in the original brief.

Makimo have all these attributes in abundance and their contribution to both understanding the coding and how the product will work in the real world has been invaluable. It has been a true collaboration which the client wishes to maintain through the funding and launch processes and onward into the future. Makimo’s dedication, their ability to walk the client through the process as well as their skill in understanding the market have been an asset right from the very beginning.

Their all-encompassing approach is unique in the development environment and so adds value beyond similar software production houses.

James O’Brien, founder

Client

Our client is a pre-seed stage startup from Ireland. Having found a specific niche in the eCommerce market, they have been looking for the opportunity to monetize their idea of building a SaaS platform with a certain twist.

As the platform would be the source of innovation of their startup, no existing off-the-shelf product would satisfy them, so they turned to Makimo to have a custom solution developed.

While the general idea of creating a B2B2C platform does not seem unique or new, it is the exceptional association between the brand promise, the target group and our client that pushed the idea into making a unique, bespoke solution, not truly found anywhere else in the world.

Krzysztof Rychlicki-Kicior, Makimo’s CEO

Problem

The problem we faced was – how to shape a software platform that would be similar to other dropshipping platforms, but so easy to use that anyone could become a seller on the platform.

This challenge was additionally constrained by the budget, as we are talking about an entire platform, not a single eCommerce shop. Thus, the whole project had to balance between architecture that would scale up in the future and the effort that needed to be put forth for that to happen.

What we did

From the beginning of our partnership with the founders, we’ve been discovering the exact shape of the resulting software collaboratively, during in-person workshop sessions. We met every few months to progress on the core concept, helped to research possible competition and Makimo’s responsibility was to translate all that insight into technical and visual terms. 

We rendered Vendor’s rich and personal idea into a comprehensive, scalable, but not soulless system that provides solutions to real-life issues.

Justyna Papiernik, head of UX

We prepared a working prototype of the whole platform for all three roles present on the platform: Suppliers, Sellers and Buyers. To manage the whole backlog of features, we put a heavy emphasis on the role of the Product Owner – the person representing the client’s interest in the project. That way we were able to actively manage the backlog of the features and maintain velocity while delegating larger decisions. That role was taken by Michał Moroz.

Experience helps here. I’ve built an ecommerce platform from the ground up earlier during my career, and for that exact reason I had some understanding of the priorities of items that went into building this platform, and could suggest the minimal scope of work to get to the prototype stage.

Michał Moroz, Chief Innovation Officer

The biggest technical challenge was to overcome the issue of providing a unique and seamless experience for each seller and their clients, using a simplified version of Multi-Tenant architecture. It wasn’t a walk in the park, however, cloud and AWS made this task a lot easier than we had expected.

Vendor was made to provide outstanding experience and our architecture is ready to deliver on that promise.

Kamil Kucharski, project’s Technical Leader

Timeline

The project started in 2020 and gained more traction during the development phase in 2021. Due to the nature of our collaboration, actual development was made in burst phases where we allocated a whole team to focus only on this. These stages were intertwined with phases of idea development.

We’re targeting MVP readiness somewhere between 2000–2500 man hours, and the platform to be available in 2023.

Technology stack

• Python (Flask)
• AWS Cognito integration (see Mateusz Głowiński’s article discussing mocking in Cognito)
• Stripe integration
• JavaScript (Vue.js)
• Atomic Design (see Aleksander Krawiel’s article presenting the concept)
• Architecture – Monolith with Component-Based Decomposition + Separation of concerns

We introduced a front end architecture that allows the reuse of components between panels, which saves time and keeps visual compatibility.

Dominik Bisiakowski, front end developer

Our unique contribution

The unique blend of our partnership came from the following factors:

• being able to understand and then deliver a software platform – building it up to the prototype phase and targeting Minimum Viable Product as the next phase
• allocating the budget on the core features and reaching milestones with workable software
• building scalable software that will grow down the line while streamlining multitenancy to fit current needs of a startup
• providing as much guidance and consultation as possible to our partners, especially in the technical areas of expertise that Makimo excels in, but also further developing the business idea

Heroes of the project

Justyna Papiernik · Krzysztof Rychlicki-Kicior · Kamil Kucharski · Mateusz Głowiński · Dominik Bisiakowski · Daria Grochowska · Mateusz Papiernik · Marcin Struś · Kamil Kominek