Impact Us Today
Why we decided to completely rewrite their application
Overview
Impact Us Today is a platform that facilitates energy-efficient home renovations by connecting homeowners with qualified contractors. It offers an integrated system that translates homeowner queries into price quotes from reliable contractors, ensuring a smooth renovation process.
At madewithlove, we embrace brownfield software products. We believe that even the most outdated legacy code delivers value and needs to be cherished. We often push back against the idea of complete rewrites and have been very vocal about the negative impact such a rewrite can have on a business. In 90% of cases, upgrading and improving the existing product gradually is better.
But sometimes, we hit these 1 in 10 scenarios, and Impact Us Today was such an exception.
Background
Impact Us Today was founded in 2014, and like most startups, they pivoted a lot while exploring the market. That meant introducing some historical baggage and carrying the weight of old decisions. When KBC joined as an investor, they asked madewithlove to perform technical due diligence to look at the product under the hood.
The main outcome of that audit was that they were running an old version of PHP that had reached end-of-life two or three years prior. The frameworks they used were also out of date, making a partial upgrade tough. On top of that, the original platform was written by two people who were no longer with the company, and there was little test automation.
A final factor was that the product management team challenged them to ask: do we need all of this? What is the core of the product? Do we need 100% of the feature set, or can we cut? Those factors made them decide to go for a full rewrite.
Results
The big advantage of a rewrite is the clarity of your path. You know exactly what you want to build. Agile software development spends a lot of time exploring possible solutions. You build, you tweak, you learn, and you refactor. But when rebuilding from scratch, you've already learned those lessons.
The entire product was built in a few months because they knew already where they needed to go.
They now keep room in the roadmap for operational work. Gradually keeping things up to date is a lot easier than doing the big moves, so they're really diligent about that right now.
What they said
“The big advantage of a rewrite is the clarity of your path. You know exactly what you want to build. The entire product was built in a few months because we knew already where we needed to go.”
“Gradually keeping things up to date is a lot easier than doing the big moves. We're not going to be in a position again where we are so behind that it becomes a huge endeavor to catch up again.”
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