Just Book — an on-demand services platform (apps, web & APIs)

The brief

Book any trusted service in a few taps — and run the whole two-sided marketplace behind it.

Just Book set out to be the easiest way to book a trusted local service in Britain — across thousands of categories, with corporate accounts on top of consumer bookings. Marketplaces are the hardest thing on this list to build, and not for the reason people expect. The engineering is tractable. What is hard is that a marketplace is two products that have to launch at the same time, each useless without the other, and a third one — the back office — that decides whether the business can actually be operated.

The consumer side had to work the way British customers expect to find anything local, which means postcode first. A category-first search that then asks where you are is the wrong order and it feels wrong immediately. The provider side had to be worth a tradesperson's evening: profile, quoting, chat, and getting paid without chasing. And in between sat the trust problem every services marketplace lives or dies on — a customer letting a stranger into their house needs to know who verified them, and a screen that says "verified" without saying by whom is worth nothing.

On top of that, two apps and a web platform meant one set of business rules had to hold identically in three places, or the same booking would mean different things depending on where you looked at it.