Clean Me Marketplace

App + Backend Platform Build

4.8

The brief:

Clean Me bring the car wash to your doorstep. Through the Clean Me platform, drivers across the UK can compare pricing of local mobile car washers, chat with them before committing to a booking - and purchase a mobile car wash at a date, time, and location of their choosing.

Clean Me had previously worked with a few outsourcing agencies to build their React Native mobile application and their PHP backend, however the quality of the app and platform left a lot to be desired. Poor code quality, missing functionality, and general instability meant that significant work was needed to allow the product to launch.

Clean Me needed an experienced mobile consultancy to take over the project and bring it back on track, before the platform could be launched on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.

Our solution:

We onboarded a small team, consisting of two engineering consultants and a designer to take over the project. We performed some immediate tasks, including:

setting up version control, to keep code centralised in a single secure location
creating automated build pipelines, to allow the team to create & distribute new builds for testing without using developer time
auditing the React Native & PHP codebases, enabling us to build a list of immediate, short term, medium term, and long term tasks to nurture the platform back to health.

Working alongside the Clean Me team, we prioritised these tasks to ensure time remained available to continue to add new functionality. Some of our work included:

upgrading some long-outdated dependencies within the project, and in some cases removing deprecated code and rebuilding functionality to use modern alternatives
fixing and optimised unreliable push notifications, allowing Clean Me to easily message their users and notify them of new chat messages and updates to their bookings
overhauling the chat functionality, building a bespoke in-house solution allowing washers and customers to easily communicate in a safe & managed environment - helping customers build trust with the platform and their chosen washer whilst ensuring that the company was not tied in to a third-party vendor
optimising existing logic to improve performance
refactoring various parts of the codebase to remove unnecessarily complex logic, allowing the project to scale more efficiently in the future

By working alongside Clean Me to overhaul their platform, Peslo enabled the prompt and successful launch of the platform in January 2024, two months after taking over the project. Since the initial launch, we've also:

redesigned & rebuilt the 'washer' side of the app, that the car wash companies use to accept and manage their bookings, allowing them to more easily curate their in-app profile
rebuilt the core booking flow, reducing friction when customers want to quickly book their car wash
added the ability for car washers to link their calendar, so that customers cannot book appointments when washers are unavailable, and remove the need for washers to cancel appointments that they cannot fulfil
introduced the ability to reschedule a booking in-app, reducing the need for support to make changes to customer bookings - and the ability for washers to add bookings to the app that did not originate from the Clean Me platform
removed the requirement for users to first log in before seeing the app - one of the biggest friction points when downloading an app is needing to create an account; we recognised this as a potential friction point and guided work to allow prospective customers to look around the app prior to signing up - building trust with the platform and going on to make bookings that otherwise would have been lost
redesigned & rebuilt the customer side of the app, to provide a modern & cohesive feel whilst removing friction points that cause prospective customers to look elsewhere
implemented a new onboarding flow, to quickly collect the data needed to show a prospective customer the value they can get from using the Clean Me platform

We're proud of our work for Clean Me, which has since allowed them to continue to grow and expand to cover large sections of the UK - providing a high quality and modern platform for car washers to operate their business, and a trusted location for those who need a car wash to book with trusted businesses. By comprehensively refactoring both the mobile app and backend PHP platform, optimising API endpoints and improving response times, we transformed Clean Me's app into a modern, efficient, and scalable platform.