Impact Us Today
Why we decided to completely rewrite their application
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.
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 We believe that even the most outdated legacy code delivers value and needs to be cherished.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 The frameworks they used were also out of date, making a partial upgrade tough.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.
The Rewrite in Practice
Dropping features meant taking away existing functionality from users — not always easy. Impact Us Today serves three types of users and made the strategic decision to focus on one type while delivering a more basic first version for the others. One of these target audiences already had limited useful functionality in the original platform, and after stripping away all the product bloat, they were left with something rather barebones. That led to some frustration, but the team managed to work it away post-release by focusing more on their needs.
Managing opportunity cost was another challenge. Development on the legacy codebase was intentionally wound down — if a task did not deliver value within the year, it did not make it to the backlog. Security work on the legacy platform continued, and at a certain point the old platform was placed behind a VPN to keep the attack surface small. Ironically, this friction helped convert users to the new platform where that extra friction did not exist.
Running both platforms in parallel proved harder than expected. The hosting and maintenance costs of the old platform did not decrease even for a small number of users. Every step between a full migration carried development overhead, making it effectively an all-or-nothing situation. Customers with projects that had long lead times — months in some cases — meant the old platform had to remain operational for nearly two years after the new one launched.
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 decisions have already been made, and that allows you to develop at breakneck speed. The entire product was built in a few months because they knew already where they needed to go.
One unexpected lesson was around early feedback. The team wishes they had involved early access users sooner. Once the first users were onboarded on the new platform, their feature requests slowed progress slightly — the product launched one month behind schedule, mainly due to user-driven additions. That said, one month behind schedule for a project of this scale is impressive.
Today, Impact Us Today keeps room in the roadmap for operational work. Gradually keeping things up to date is a lot easier than doing the big moves, so they are really diligent about that right now. A major framework update in the following year was limited to a single week of work. They are not going to be in a position again where they are so behind that it becomes a huge endeavour to catch up.
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.”
Jef Daniels
CEO Impact Us Today
“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.”
Jef Daniels
CEO Impact Us Today
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