“A marketplace where anyone can register as a user to create a job listing. Then users with seller accounts can see the details and accept the job.”
After very mild start of the winter of 2020, on 12.1.2021 we suddenly got 30cm of snow in just couple of days. Everything went to chaos when every property owner wanted their yard, road or parking area plowed and there really are just so many plowing equipment owners available. Availability of the services across the country was poor for the next weeks.
I had been thinking about a yard service marketplace for a while already but the sudden snow situation kicked me into gear and I started learning web hosting from scratch. I already had all the hardware; a home server (which runs this blog too) with virtual machines, databases and docker.
For the last month practically all my free time has been taken by the project, learning web engine configuration, PHP and SQL back-end, HTML, CSS and SCSS front end. On 7th of February I made pihatyöt.com public and registrations were opened.
On the site is a marketplace where anyone can register as a user to create a job listing. Then users with seller accounts can see the details of the job and accept the job, hiding it from the listing view. Jobs currently supported are manual snow clearing, snow plowing, lawnmowing, raking, plowing and fixing unpaved roads, as well as categories “other yard work” and “other garden work”
I believe this site will lower many property owners treshold to order yard services and make it possible at all for owners of work equipment work as independent contractors.
I put a great priority on mobile usability and security, as 53,3% of all web browsing is done on mobile devices as of 2019. (source: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/mobile-desktop-internet-usage-statistics) As I created the whole website from ground up myself I had full control of using the best practises like semantic HTML5 tags and div grids.
Mobile view, iPhone X 
Tablet view, iPad 
Desktop view, 1080p
Now the next stages are Search Engine Optimization, UI and UX fine tuning, and naturally user acquisition. At a later point I want to integrate a payment processor to the site for added security for both buyer and seller.
Other features I am going to implement as I get the time to do so: email notifications on new job listings available, rating of sellers, possible expiration of listings, ability to upload photos for reference.
For the business model of the site I am planning on implementing monthly fee for users registered as sellers, allowing them to accept jobs. For the time being the site is 100% free to use until it has yet undefined amount of regular users.