The problem
Small construction contractors still coordinate trades over SMS and Excel. When the plumber slips a day, no one tells the tiler, who shows up to a wet floor and bills for nothing. The cascade is invisible until it lands as a delay and a dispute. Enterprise tools exist, Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, but they price at €375 to €3,000+ a month, require training, and assume a project manager who has time to use them.
Artisans are not that audience. They want the right alert on the right phone at the right time, and to be told what changed when the plan slips.
Our approach
We built an opinionated MVP around three primitives: jobs, dependencies, and actors. The system holds the plan, detects conflicts (overlapping trades on the same zone, dependencies broken by a date change, missing prerequisites), and recalculates the cascade automatically when any actor pushes a date.
Notifications go where the team already is: SMS and email. No "download the app, create an account, watch this onboarding". A magic-link authentication, a job catalog that matches French trade vocabulary, and a phased roadmap that lets a contractor start with one site before extending.
The design constraint: the worst tool to compete with is not Procore. It's WhatsApp. So we made notifications WhatsApp-fast and the read view phone-friendly first.
What we shipped
- A multi-trade coordination platform with server-side conflict detection and cascade recalculation
- SMS, email and web notifications, magic-link auth, no passwords
- French trade-vocabulary job catalog mapped to standard phases
- Production-ready deployment on an OVH VPS
Stack
Why it works
The platform is opinionated where it should be (the rules engine and notification logic) and quiet where it shouldn't (no onboarding theatre, no dashboard the artisan doesn't want). It addresses a market of 4.5 million French artisans that the enterprise category has structurally ignored.