The Collective is a co-living community with a mission to build and activate spaces that foster human connection and enable people to lead more fulfilling lives.

The Collective approached us as they were looking for a trusted software partner, to help them build the platform for managing the data and processes related to their co-living services.

The goal was to pull everything together into a unified solution and create a property management system for co-living, short and long-term stays, including a CRM module.

The Collective was looking for someone proactive to lead the development of certain parts of the system while communicating closely with the product team. HackSoft was a natural fit for that, so we jumped right in.

The Challenge

There were a lot of challenges involved in the process. One of them was figuring out how to gather the data from all existing spreadsheets and various business software and start pulling all of this together in a unified solution, without disrupting the existing process.

Another one was to introduce a level of operational stability in the software, so everyone could continue doing their day-to-day job, while the software was rapidly evolving and adjusting to the needs of the client.

The software development process involved a lot of cross-team communication and syncing, so we had to be on point with that.

The Solution

HackSoft leveraged the power and maturity of Django, to be the backbone of the entire system. With the addition of React, the overall architecture of the system was good enough to ship everything to production in a timely manner.

All of this was running on a combined infrastructure of Heroku and AWS, where HackSoft was in charge of building and maintaining that.

Working closely with the product team, we were involved in product discussions, figuring out the best way to achieve the needed results.

Timely and efficient communication was key to the product's success - shortening the development-to-production cycle, so we can get valuable feedback.

They are very attentive to details. If we’ve suggested an idea and they’ve seen another avenue or something we haven’t thought through, they make sure we have all the essential information.

- David Sinclair, Product Manager

Results and Feedback

The results speak for themselves - HackSoft were able to ship the platform to production and provide ongoing support & feature development.

The platform enabled The Collective to perform their operations tasks more efficiently and to focus on their core business - enabling people to lead more fulfilling lives.

Their software makes our operations much more efficient and makes people's jobs easier.

- David Sinclair, Product Manager