PlanDo.

Client & context

PlanDo's founder wanted to make social networking about doing things together rather than scrolling. The idea: help people with shared interests who live or work close to each other find one another, and give them a reason to meet in person through fun, slightly adventurous activities.

The challenge

Social discovery apps live or die on the first few minutes. A new user has to see relevant people and events immediately, or they leave. That meant three hard problems at once:

• Relevance from day one - matching by hobbies and location even when a city has only a handful of users.
• Low-friction onboarding - letting people bring their existing friends instead of starting from an empty network.
• Safety and moderation - user-generated meetups, photos and chat need an administrator who can act quickly.

The app also had to support several languages from launch, because the founder planned to grow beyond one market.

What we built

We designed and built a native mobile app with an administrator back office. The core flows:

• Meet - a feed of people ranked by shared hobbies and distance, with profiles a tap away.
• Explore - activities and meetups nearby that a user can join in one tap.
• Create - anyone can propose their own meetup with a place, time and group size.
• Social login and friend import - integration with popular social networks so people bring their friends along.
• Group chat for each meetup, plus direct messages to stay in touch afterwards.
• Memories - photos and comments shared after an event.
• Multi-language interface and an extended admin panel for moderation, content and user management.

Process & timeline

The project ran as Discovery → Design → Build → QA on a time-and-materials basis. Discovery fixed the matching rules and the minimum feature set for launch; design went through clickable prototypes before any code; the build ran in two-week sprints with a working build in the founder's hands every sprint. From brief to launch took 12 weeks.

Results

PlanDo launched on iOS and Android with matching, meetups, chat and moderation in place, and the founder could start growing the community city by city.

The founder got a launch-ready product with moderation in place from day one, so the community could be grown city by city without rebuilding the core.

At our current rates, a build of this scope would cost about £35–60k — an estimate from the feature list, not the original invoice.

If we built it today

Today we would start with a two-week discovery to pin down the matching rules and the launch city, then ship a cross-platform app (React Native or Flutter) so iOS and Android share one codebase. Matching would use a recommendation layer that improves as people join and attend meetups, with in-app reporting and automated moderation for photos and chat. A first release of a product like this typically takes 6–8 weeks; our rates start from £49/hour per developer, and £65–£70/hour for a full team with QA and product ownership. Discovery starts from £3,000.

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