Plunjr connects homeowners with licensed plumbers over video calls. We built them a deliberately raw, fixed-budget MVP, a single Call Now button, that answered the question their feature-packed app hadn’t: will customers actually call. We then developed the platform through several pivots into a production-grade property-management product.
The Situation
When we engaged, Plunjr already had a production app live for over a year, with video calls, payments, scheduling, 100+ installs a day, yet very few real customer calls. The app had been built by a U.S. agency at a cost the company couldn’t sustain, and video streaming ran on a niche early-stage framework, below the reliability bar Skype and Teams had already set in users’ heads. The system had plenty of features and no answer to the only question the business depended on.
What We Did
The first engagement was a fixed-budget MVP, built in a few weeks, codenamed “The Big Button Project.” One giant Call Now button. It was deliberately raw: no new features, no polish, an experiment rather than a product. Its only job was to isolate the primary thesis and surface real customer motivations and objections. An MVP this raw buys you an answer, not an app. That trade was the point.
From there, ongoing development iterated on market feedback through several pivots. We migrated video to industry-standard platforms, Twilio Video, then Zoom, with native calling via CallKit, and expanded to Android and web interfaces for technicians and property managers. When the first paying clients arrived, we turned the quality dial deliberately: test coverage, automation, refactoring, infrastructure sized for load, documentation catch-up. The rapid-experiment codebase became production-grade because paying customers made that the right standard, not earlier and not later.
What Moved
The market question was answered for a few weeks of fixed-budget work: client motivations and objections were identified before further feature spend. After the platform migration, video and calling reliability matched the leading communicators, and daily video calls across iOS, Android, and web ran undisrupted once paying clients depended on it; these are qualitative observations from the time, not numbers we recorded. The contrast that mattered was cost-to-learn: the MVP answered the market question for roughly $10K, a fraction of what the prior feature-rich app had cost, with specialists flexed per stage.
Where It Went
Over the engagement’s multi-year arc the product grew into a property-management platform: multi-party real-time chat, payments, e-commerce, nested organizational permissions, Stripe and HomeDepot integrations. Our team worked alongside the founder, a product manager, and supporting marketing and analytics roles. The lesson we kept: calibrate the quality standard to the product’s stage. Gold-plating an experiment wastes the budget, and shipping an experiment to paying customers wastes the trust.