How we work
Projects
Client
Mendy
Technologies
React
React Native
Laravel
PHP
Industry
Real estate
Duration
2022-2023
About the company
Mendy was a startup founded by house repair and staffing experts with an idea worth pursuing: connect homeowners in Sweden with skilled handymen over video call. Instead of waiting days for an in-person visit, people could get help with broken appliances, leaks, and other home problems within minutes, at an accessible price. Handymen could work remotely. It was a clean concept.
The company didn’t make it.
About a year in, the founders set a clear target: reach €50K/month within 6 months or shut down. They shut it down.
The market hypothesis didn’t hold up. Changing behavior in the real estate industry takes far longer than the runway allowed.
We built the platform. We’re proud of how we built it. And we’re sharing this case because honest track records matter more than polished ones.
The Mendy team was building something that didn’t exist on the market yet.
That meant relying on industry experience and hypotheses rather than proven demand, which is a high-risk starting point for any product.
The challenge
The core of the platform was video calls. Everything else had to be built around getting that experience right: GDPR-compliant, stable, with a well-documented SDK. Equally important was the interface. If a homeowner couldn’t request help in a few taps, the product failed at its first job.
One of the early decisions we worked through together was whether to build a mobile app or a web app for the MVP. That call shaped the entire technical direction.
THE TECH
We started with the essential flows: handymen registering, users requesting video calls, and the connection between them. As the product evolved, we expanded the design to cover the super admin, expert, and company-facing portions of the platform.
We built the app in React Native, one codebase, both iOS and Android. Firebase handled deployment and integration with Google services. For video calls, we integrated an external, GDPR-compliant service with robust SDK support and a proven track record. For payments, we integrated BankID, Swish, Klarna, and Stripe, the full Swedish payment stack users expect.
The admin panel was built in React.js. Super admins could see the full picture: all companies, users, experts, and handymen on the platform. Analytics covered successful calls, problems resolved, ongoing and closed cases, and reviews. Companies could register independently, add their service offerings, and manage their employees.
We chose Laravel with PHP and PostgreSQL, a well-tested combination that handles relational data well and suited the complexity of the platform’s user and company structure.
END RESULT
Nikola, our co-founder, still wears the Mendy hoodie. He’ll tell you it’s because of the logo, and honestly, it is a great logo. But more than that, it’s a reminder of the journey and the people he met along the way.
The technical side? We’re proud of it. A solid cross-platform app, the full Swedish payment stack, GDPR-compliant video calls built around a reliable SDK. The code did what it was supposed to do.
What didn’t work was the business hypothesis. Changing behavior in the real estate industry takes far longer than most startup timelines allow.
Homeowners and landlords in Sweden weren’t ready to swap in-person handymen for a video call, at least not at the pace the business needed. We shut it down. 3 months later, zendev team was already on the next thing.
Some projects end in product-market fit. Some end in a hoodie and a lesson you carry into every startup conversation after. Both are worth putting on the website.
