A professional membership community wanted somewhere its members could ask a question and reach someone who actually knows the answer. That is a platform and an app, not a website.
What they were after
A group of professionals spread across several countries, with a great deal of expertise inside it and no structure for getting that expertise to the member who needs it. The knowledge existed. Finding the right person for a specific question depended on knowing who to ask, which meant it worked for the well-connected and not for anyone else.
They wanted a members’ website and a phone app. What they were describing underneath that was a matching problem.
What we built
- A members’ platform where a question is posted once and routed to the members whose stated expertise fits it, rather than broadcast to everyone and answered by whoever happens to be online.
- Expert profiles with real structure — fields, skills and seniority that the matching can actually use. A free-text bio is unsearchable in any useful sense.
- An iOS app sharing the platform’s code, so a feature ships to the web and the phone together instead of drifting apart into two products.
- Access control enforced in the database. Who can see which member’s details is a rule the database itself applies, not a check in application code that a future feature can forget to make.
- Privacy designed to a statute, not a template. The data model was built around the privacy law the community actually operates under, including what deliberately is not stored.
Two decisions worth explaining
Access rules belong in the database. Putting them in application code means every new query is a chance to leak, and the failure is silent — nothing errors, the wrong person simply sees something. In the database, a query written wrongly returns nothing rather than returning someone else’s data. On a platform holding professional identities, that difference is the whole design.
Privacy compliance is cheap at the schema stage and expensive afterwards. Deciding what a table may hold before it holds anything costs an afternoon. Deciding it after two years of members’ data is a migration, a retention policy and a conversation nobody enjoys.
Why this sits alongside the local business work
It looks like the outlier in this portfolio and it is the same job. A community that cannot route a question to the right person and a contractor who cannot get back to an enquiry have the same problem at different scales: something valuable is arriving and there is no system to move it to the person who can act on it.
Talk to us about a platform
If you are running a membership or a community on group chats and a spreadsheet and it has outgrown them, that is a conversation worth having early. Get in touch, or read about the technology division.