The idea behind Progressive83 was simple: make it easy for anyone to start and grow a service business online — beginning with cleaning services, then branching into other industries down the line. Think bookings, payments, and scheduling all living in one place, so a would-be business owner in the UK, US, Canada, or Australia could get up and running without duct-taping five different tools together.

To pull that off, Progressive83 needed to build a fairly complex platform from scratch — multiple user roles, a pile of third-party integrations, and an MVP that had to ship fast. So they came to us looking for a partner who could do both halves of the job: help shape what the product should actually be, then roll up our sleeves and build it — from early discovery and design all the way through full-scale engineering.

We kicked things off with a four-week discovery phase — a small, focused crew of a Project Owner, Tech Lead, and Designer. The goal was to figure out exactly what we were building and whether it’d actually work before writing a line of code. That meant scoping the project, mapping out Release 1 and Release 2 with real timelines, spotting the risks early and planning around them, and sketching the first design concepts for both web and mobile.

We came out of it with a clear roadmap for the MVP and everything after — including user flows for all four people who’d touch the platform: the Business Owner, the Admin, the Contractor, and the Customer.

From there we built out the branding, a full UI system covering both the Business Owner web app and the Contractor mobile app, and a brandbook to keep everything looking like it belonged together, no matter where you ran into it.

Once the designs were locked, the dev team started a ten-month build on Node.js (NestJS), PostgreSQL, Redis, React, React Native, Docker, Auth0, Stripe, Twilio SendGrid, and React Admin for the super admin side. Here’s what we built, piece by piece:

We didn’t reinvent the wheels that didn’t need reinventing. For the heavy-lifting bits, we plugged in a few trusted tools:

• Stripe for secure payments, 3D Secure included.
• Auth0 for role-based logins across Business Owners, Admins, Contractors, and Customers.
• SendGrid for email — booking confirmations, marketing updates, the lot.

The platform is in the home stretch of MVP development. The core modules — logins, service onboarding, contractor management, booking, payments (3D Secure included), scheduling, and notifications — are built and going through round after round of testing. The contractor mobile app is functionally done, and the business owner dashboard is heading into QA.

At this point Fulcrum has shipped a fully custom booking engine, multi-role access control, and the Stripe, Auth0, and SendGrid integrations. The widget system — the thing that lets each business owner drop a booking experience straight onto their own landing page — is getting polished right now for wider compatibility and better performance.

The trickier stuff along the way — DevOps setup, a few frontend tech calls — is sorted. Now it’s about stability, tightening up the UX, and getting everything ready for a pilot run. The MVP is on track for internal evaluation, and once that’s done, we start onboarding real users.