Curbee - DVx Ventures
Joining forces with the former COO of Lyft and former President of Tesla to build the future of automotive repair
Website
Platforms
Web
Mobile (React Native)
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Stripe
Expertise
Frontend Development
Backend & Infrastructure Development
Integrations
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About Curbee & DVx Ventures
After raising $40M to build a few moonshot startups from scratch, some of the brightest minds on the internet like Jon McNeil, Sami Shalabi, John Sweigart, and Karim Bousta approached us at Lazer to help build, launch, and iterate on Curbee - a service which takes the hassle out of owning a car.
Because of our past experience building, launching, and selling Fiix, it was the perfect match. Within just a few short months, we launched Curbee to the world.
Our Approach
With a short timeline ahead of us, we worked swiftly with the Curbee team to collaboratively design the platform and improve the overall experience.
A home to manage the health of your car
After a home, a car is the normally a person’s 2nd largest expense. But unlike a home, the average person doesn't maintain their investment well because vehicle maintenance is frustrating, cumbersome, and filled with bad actors. With the Curbee app, we built a home where you could subscribe your vehicle to a maintenance plan, have a technician visit monthly to clean and maintain it, see the vehicle’s overall health score, view repair history, and book one-off services.
Leveraging the power of React and Next.js for performance
By leveraging the power of React and Next.js, we were able to develop the Curbee web app to be server-side rendered. This also allowed us to quickly load pages with no need for refreshes while navigating the app. This overall led to a desktop and mobile website feel that was as crisp as a native app.
Deep integration with Stripe for easy payments
Payments are naturally hard. For Curbee, we built a deep integration with Stripe to manage users credit cards, handle multiple subscriptions per user (one per vehicle), performance invoicing, view payment history, and more. For the Curbee backend, we used Stripe webhooks to update data so Curbee admins can use the Stripe UI to manage subscriptions - empowering cross functional work across the org.
A customer-facing app and a crew-member app for the marketplace
Similar to how Uber is a two-sided marketplace with a ride and driver app, Curbee also is a two-sided marketplace where every customer order needs to be serviced by a crew member. Thus, we needed to create both a customer-facing app and a crew-member app.
To optimize for engineering speed, the crew app was built off the base of the consumer app which speaks to the reusability of the codebase. With minimal effort we were able to create an app designed for crew members on the go. With the crew app, they could select a job, notify the customer with status updates, complete a vehicle report with dates and feedback, and report back to Curbee HQ with followup info.
Mission control for a highly efficient operations team
No great operations-driven platform exists without a powerful admin panel. This 3rd app we needed to develop would be the go-to place for the Curbee team to do things like create appointments for users, add vehicles to profiles, process payments, view history, add notes, and manage the operations as a whole.
Optimizing the operations dashboard
After evaluating React Admin, we found that leveraging our reusable React components would let the team move faster with a consistent UI. To optimize for performance, we used some clever design methods and implemented things such as lazy-loading data as display cards were expanded, so that hundreds of cards could be rendered in an instant on-load and further CSS draws and data fetches could be saved.
Releasing 3 apps to prod, multiple times a day, with 0 downtime
At the end of the day, an engineering team is only as fast as it can release, and because of Curbee's startup nature, iterative releases were part of the culture.
To ensure developers could release as often as they'd like, we setup a flow where each push to main would automatically:
• Build a docker image on CircleCI using build variables for the stage environment, and push the AWS Container Registry
• Create a new staging task deploy on AWS ECS, and once healthy, turn off the old task for 0 downtime releases to staging
• Once manual testing was completed on stage, with one click on CircleCI, the production build would kick off and follow a similar pattern to go live
The Result
Overall, the creation and launch of Curbee was a huge success. Working with former leadership from Tesla, Lyft, Google, BCG, was a joy and helped push the best product to market, quickly. We’re excited for the future of Curbee and are excited to continuously work with DVx Ventures on more great companies.