BizConnect — On-Demand Services Marketplace App for New Zealand
Built BizConnect — a dual-sided on-demand services marketplace for New Zealand connecting clients with local professionals across 37+ service categories including plumbing, electrical, cleaning, automotive, photography, babysitting, and catering. The platform features real-time job posting, smart provider matching by district, secure in-app messaging, push notifications, booking management, ratings and reviews, and a dedicated provider dashboard with job leads, calendar, and business analytics. Live on the App Store with a 5.0-star rating.
Client
BizConnect NZ
Project Value
$60,000+
Rating
The Challenge
New Zealand's local services market was fragmented — clients found tradespeople through word of mouth, static directory websites, and Facebook groups. There was no centralised platform for posting a job and receiving qualified quotes from nearby professionals. Service providers had no digital channel to discover new leads in their service area, manage their schedule, and build a reputation through verified client reviews. The business needed a full two-sided marketplace — with a clean consumer booking experience and a professional-grade provider dashboard — that could launch in a regulated market with real payment, identity, and notification infrastructure from day one.
The Goal
Design and launch a production iOS marketplace app covering both sides of the transaction: a client-facing flow for browsing providers by category, posting jobs with location and urgency signals, messaging providers, and leaving verified reviews; and a provider-facing dashboard for discovering job leads by district, managing bookings, tracking business stats (jobs completed, monthly bookings, average rating), and maintaining a professional profile with badges and portfolio. The app needed to support 37+ service categories, district-based job matching, guest browsing, and full push notification coverage on day one.
Solution & Implementation
1Analysis
Conducted discovery across three stakeholder groups: homeowners seeking one-time service jobs, regular maintenance clients, and service providers ranging from sole-trader tradespeople to small service businesses. Identified the top friction points on each side: for clients — inability to find and verify local providers quickly, no transparent pricing signal before committing, and fragmented communication across phone and text; for providers — no structured lead pipeline, no reputation-building mechanism beyond Facebook reviews, and no scheduling visibility. Mapped 37 service categories from building and plumbing through photography, babysitting, and catering — and designed the data model to support both categorical browse and full-text search with district-level geographic filtering.
2Designing Solution
Selected Flutter for cross-platform mobile development to maximise code reuse between client and provider experiences while delivering a native-quality UI on iOS. Firebase handled authentication (email/password and social sign-in), Firestore for real-time data (job posts, messages, notifications), and Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications across both client and provider flows. Node.js microservices handled business logic: district-first job matching, provider notification fanning when a job is posted in a provider's service area, and review aggregation. The provider dashboard was designed as a separate in-app mode — switching from client to business view — to keep the UX clean without requiring separate app downloads. Google Maps API powered location input, geocoding, and district boundary matching.
3Customizing Business Logic
Built a category browsing home screen with circular icon tiles for the top 8 categories (Plumbing, Automotive, Electrical, Catering, Photography, Babysitting, Cleaning, More) and a Top-Rated Providers carousel surfacing the highest-rated professionals with their rate, rating, and profile photo. The job posting flow captures job title, detailed description, service type, precise location (with Detect Location and manual edit options), required date, and an Urgent flag — reducing the average time to post a job to under 90 seconds. District-first matching sends targeted push notifications to providers in the relevant service area as soon as a job is posted. The provider business dashboard displays Quick Stats (total jobs completed, monthly bookings, average rating), a live job opportunities feed showing new leads with location and budget, and a calendar snapshot with colour-coded booking availability. In-app messaging with conversation threading, role labels (showing each user's professional title), and unread badge indicators enables all client–provider communication without leaving the platform.
4Scale & Optimize
Implemented guest mode so clients can browse job postings and provider profiles without registering — reducing friction for first-time users and improving App Store conversion. Added Forgot Password and structured error messaging across all auth and job action flows after user testing revealed completion drop-off at those points. Notification badge rendering on the home screen for both client and provider modes ensures unread alerts are always visible. Deployed incremental version releases (1.0.3 through 1.0.5) with documented changelogs — fixing file upload issues for profile pictures, improving push notification delivery for job completion and new lead events, and refining the admin analytics dashboard. Built a web-based admin panel for platform management, user moderation, and job visibility controls.
Results & Impact
Service Categories
App Store Rating
Avg. Job Post Time
Platforms
Matching Logic
Dual-sided marketplace in a single app — clients post jobs and browse providers; service professionals switch to business mode to manage leads, bookings, and profile without a second download
District-first job matching: when a job is posted, push notifications fan out to all providers registered in the matching geographic district in real time — maximising lead relevance and response speed
37+ service categories from plumbing and electrical through photography, babysitting, and catering — each with dedicated icon, search, and provider matching logic
Guest mode allows anonymous job browsing without registration — reducing top-of-funnel friction and improving App Store conversion to install
Provider business dashboard with Quick Stats (total jobs completed, monthly bookings, average rating), live job opportunity feed, and calendar snapshot with colour-coded booking availability
In-app messaging with threaded conversations, professional role labels on each participant, unread badge counters, and search — eliminating the need for any off-platform communication
Job posting flow reduced to under 90 seconds: title, description, service type, GPS-detected location, date picker, and Urgent flag — with inline edit for manual location override
Incremental release cadence (v1.0.3–1.0.5) with public changelogs — guest mode, district matching refinement, forgot password, push notification fixes, and performance improvements shipped in under 8 weeks post-launch
Key Technologies
Project Gallery
"Ortem built exactly what we envisioned — a marketplace that works for both sides. Our clients can find and hire local professionals in minutes. Our service providers get real leads in their area the moment a job is posted. The team handled everything from the app design to the backend matching logic and App Store submission. We launched on time and the feedback from our early users has been outstanding."
BizConnect Limited
BizConnect NZ
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Technical Approach
BizConnect's backend architecture is built around a district-first matching model rather than radius-based geosearch. When a client submits a job post, the Node.js matching service geocodes the submitted address via Google Maps Geocoding API, resolves it to a New Zealand administrative district, and executes a Firestore query filtering providers by service category and registered district. The matched provider set receives simultaneous Firebase Cloud Messaging push notifications within 2 seconds of job submission — enabling a response time that makes BizConnect competitive with phone-based service booking for time-sensitive jobs flagged as Urgent.
The dual-sided user experience is implemented as a single Flutter app with a mode switch rather than two separate applications. Both client and provider interfaces share authentication state, messaging infrastructure, and notification handling — but render entirely different home screens, navigation structures, and dashboard components based on the user's registered role. This architecture avoids the App Store fragmentation problem common in two-app marketplace strategies, where providers must download a separate app and maintain two logins. Mode-switching at the navigation layer means providers can also post jobs as clients without account switching.
Real-time messaging is built on Firestore with conversation documents structured around a job ID, allowing the messaging thread to be contextually linked to the specific job posting, service category, and location — giving both parties full context without navigating back to the job board. Unread message counts are maintained as atomic Firestore counters, updated server-side by Cloud Functions on every new message write, and surfaced as badge counts on the home screen tab bar for both client and provider modes. The admin web panel monitors platform health, manages user accounts, controls job visibility, and surfaces analytics on category volume, district activity, and provider engagement — giving BizConnect's operations team complete platform oversight without database access.
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About Ortem Technologies
Ortem Technologies is a premier custom software, mobile app, and AI development company. We serve enterprise and startup clients across the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, and the Middle East. Our cross-industry expertise spans fintech, healthcare, and logistics, enabling us to deliver scalable, secure, and innovative digital solutions worldwide.
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