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Founded just last year in Finland, Kyvykäs is a service marketplace that aims to let people outsource simple daily tasks. This startup’s main goal? To revolutionize daily workflow.

The principle is simple: why waste time on routine tasks when, with the help of Kyvykäs, a team of skilled professionals is just a few clicks away?

Kyvykäs offers its services to both individuals and corporate entities. Acting as an intermediary between clients and contractors, the platform performs an equally useful role for both parties – supplying contractors with new contracts, and allowing clients to quickly find the best contractor out there.

At present Kyvykäs is available in the Finnish cities of Joensuu and Helsinki – but scaling up is very much in the company’s immediate plans.

Services

Business Analysis
Back-End Development
Front-End Development
Project Management
QA
DevOps

Client story

Our first cycle of work with the client combined platform development with establishing financial funding for business growth

The first stage of our collaboration began with basic version development of a marketplace platform. Our client’s primary goal was to minimize time and financial expenses for market entry while getting a flexible product with future scalability.

The Roobykon Software team chose an Open Source version of the Sharetribe platform as the core technology to achieve the client’s objectives. This allowed us to develop a functional service, bring it to market, and gain initial users all in just a month.

Along with a basic set of marketplace tools, we implemented the following solutions:

• A unified user registration form – both clients and contractors initially sign up through the same form, with their role allocated later on. This approach simplified the initial registration process and made the service more accessible.

• Distinct Individual Accounts and Business Accounts – as Kyvykäs has different terms of use for individuals and corporate entities.

• Subcategories within each service category to search for professionals and services more convenient.

• Service packages for certain categories, allowing contractors to offer their clients a wider variety of collaboration options.

Kyvykäs’ launch – and the opportunities it presented for nationwide job creation – drew significant attention in Finland. The founders received a grant from the government and secured funding for the project’s future development.

The second cycle of work with the client focused on customization of the offer system and development of the service messenger

In today’s service marketplace, clients have gotten accustomed to being able to discuss terms in detail before making decisions on future collaborations. From agreeing discounts to establishing time-management and data-provision expectations, communication is key in building mutually-beneficial relationships.

In this project, the client asked Roobykon Software to improve its existing offer system to create a new, client-oriented solution.

After a thorough business analysis, our team developed a custom offer architecture using a nonstandard message exchange platform. This improved Kyvykäs users’ interaction flexibility, allowing them to offer and alter contract terms while retaining all previous negotiation stages in the system.

Technologies

Operating
system
Client-side languages
Server-side languages
Client-side libraries
frameworks

Database
Server-side libraries
frameworks
Web server

Third-party software

Problems
Solutions

• Under a standard offer system, offers are fixed and can only be accepted or declined – not altered. This outdated approach doesn’t meet present-day user expectations. • The inability to get customized offers made both service and contractor searches more complex, decreasing the percentage of successful contracts on the platform and thus causing client disengagement. This threatened the product’s prospects for competitiveness in the course of future business scaling. • One accepted, deals could not be updated – making it impossible for parties to reflect in their final contract any additional terms they had discussed later on. Because of this, Kyvykäs could not guarantee parties’ compliance with their obligations.

• Mindful that the platform is a service marketplace, we decided to make offers customizable. Our project team used the best QA and DevOps practices to make a built-in messenger with a system of standard response blocks. Each block is a ready-to-go template where, before sending an offer to another party, users can update current terms (e.g. hour count, price, etc.) and give a comment explaining the reasons for changes they’ve made to the offer. The result is that all communication processes are stored in the system and the user profile as a chain of blocks, letting both parties save the full history of changes made by both. Once both parties have clicked the ‘Confirmed’ button, the contract is fixed. • To make working with existing offers as comfortable as possible, we developed a system of filters. These allow users to distribute offers between corresponding ‘Upcoming’ and ‘Past gigs’ folders, depending on offer status (new offer/new changes and completed/declined). Users can sort offers in any folder by offer date or user’s contract role (Show all, Only show buying, Only show selling). • In addition to the block template messenger, we introduced a standard messenger to enable communication without making any changes to a current offer – a ‘Messages’ folder was added for new messages. • Feedback is strictly bound to the offer system. This eliminates any possibility of ratings cheating and improves service quality and confidence among platform users. Clients can rate their level of satisfaction using a five-star rating system. Once a contractor has met all stipulated contract terms and the offer has received a ‘Marked as complete’ status, the client can also leave a comment. The number of stars on a contractor’s offer page reflects the compound feedback received from all previous clients that accepted offers. Contractors can also leave their feedback about clients. • Response Rate and Response Time attributes were added to the contractor profile, giving clients a convenient tool to check the actual responsiveness level of a contractor.

In Summary...

The new messaging platform has made cooperation among users easier and more transparent, saving time in decision-making. What’s more, the project enabled users to work individually with each client, building new contracts with higher success rates. This in turn boosted users’ loyalty to the platform.

By successfully transforming their platform into a more client-oriented environment, Kyvykäs have been able to engage new users and extend their government grant – meaning they can now work towards more high-quality new features.

And we at Roobykon Software are set to continue our work on the project!