Naaam.org: Connecting Homeowners with Trusted Handymen

The Challenge

Handymen and service providers are hard to find and to deal with, and businesses and homeowners need an easier way that is time-saving and transparent.

The platform needed to serve multiple types of users: homeowners, service providers, and donors.

The solution idea was vague and needed thorough user research to build an easy-to-use platform for non-tech-savvy users. It also needed to provide value to service providers to make sure they adopt and stay on the platform and avoid taking clients to deal with them directly.

Our Approach

Our first task was to identify the problem the product is solving and understand the different personas involved, their demographics, frustrations, and motivations.

After that, we did a brief UX research to validate our research and assumptions, and prioritized a very minimal MVP.

While the client wanted to build a full-fledged web app, they agreed with us, as a first phase, to only build a frontend allowing the users to browse and request service providers while all the processing was done manually in the backend. This allowed us to understand the process dynamics of receiving a job request, presenting it to different providers, and helping the user to select one proposal that suits them. Doing that allowed the team to start building trust and retention with the service providers and better understand their needs to retain them on the platform.

After that, we started scaling the platform to include more features around proposal submission, job tracking, and providers’ access with a fully automated backend.

The Outcome

The Naaam platform launched successfully at the end of 2021 and started serving users in Beirut and Tripoli (the two largest cities in Lebanon), and now it is scaling to include most of the Lebanese cities and offering a wide range of handymen and freelance service providers.