Client background
Hydesq is an Australian startup founded by Alexander B. to address a genuine and growing problem in modern workplace management: how do businesses right-size their office space for hybrid working models? As hybrid work became the norm following the pandemic years, many companies found themselves paying for office space at pre-pandemic occupancy rates while actual usage was dramatically lower. At the same time, managing a hybrid office — ensuring that employees who needed to be in the office on a given day could find a desk, that team members who wanted to collaborate were seated near each other, and that the space was being used efficiently — was creating new operational complexity.
Hydesq's product vision addressed this problem from a data-first angle: by capturing real office usage patterns (who books desks, when, where, and for how long), companies could make evidence-based decisions about their office footprint. Paired with a rewards programme that incentivised employees to engage meaningfully with the platform (rather than the common pattern of booking a desk and not showing up, or not booking at all), Hydesq aimed to create a feedback loop between space usage data and employee behaviour.
Alexander B. came to Squash Apps with the concept, the design vision, and the domain expertise — but needed a development partner to build the product from scratch. The scope included three interconnected products: an admin web dashboard for workplace managers, an employee-facing mobile app for desk booking and rewards, and the backend platform connecting them.
The challenge
Building a multi-product SaaS platform from scratch for a solo founder requires disciplined scope management and a development partner willing to engage actively with product decisions rather than simply executing requirements. The scope for Hydesq was genuinely broad — admin dashboard, mobile app, gamification system, reporting engine — and fitting it within a budget of under $200,000 required careful prioritisation and a development approach that built the core user journeys first and deferred complexity.
The gamification element added meaningful technical complexity. A rewards programme that allows users to accumulate points and redeem them for prizes needs to handle concurrent user actions reliably: two employees completing a booking at the same time should not both receive double points due to a race condition. The points ledger needed to be ACID-compliant — a requirement that adds architectural complexity that a straightforward CRUD application doesn't face.
User adoption was a first-class design constraint. Workplace apps frequently fail not because of technical problems but because of adoption problems: employees either don't engage with the app, or adopt it superficially in ways that don't generate the data the workplace managers need. The gamification mechanic was specifically designed to address this, but only if the gamification system was implemented in a way that felt rewarding and fair rather than arbitrary or manipulable.
The reporting capability needed to be genuinely useful for the business decision the product was designed to support — office space right-sizing. This meant more than basic booking data: it required analysis of booking patterns over time, no-show rates (bookings made but not checked in), desk utilisation by zone, and trend analysis that would support year-over-year space planning decisions.
How we engaged
The engagement was structured as a full product build over 12 months, with monthly milestones and a collaborative working relationship between Alexander B. and the Squash Apps team. Srijith was directly involved from the first scoping conversation — something Alexander noted as a key factor in his decision to choose Squash Apps over other options he evaluated.
A notable aspect of the engagement was the advisory role the Squash Apps team played beyond pure execution. On multiple occasions, the team provided input on product decisions — feature prioritisation, UX trade-offs, technical architecture choices — that went beyond what was strictly required of a development vendor. Alexander specifically noted in his review that the team "went above and beyond even with advising or trying to help with aspects outside the scope of work."
The project management approach used a sprint model with two-week cycles, a shared Jira board, and weekly progress reviews with Alexander. The PM maintained a running risk register and escalated potential blockers early — a practice that was particularly important in a 12-month engagement where small delays can compound into significant timeline pressure.
What we built
The admin web dashboard was built as a React application giving workplace managers a comprehensive view of their office space. Core features included a real-time floor plan view showing current desk bookings and live check-in status, a booking management interface for overriding or extending bookings and managing recurring reservations for permanent desks, a zone and resource management console for configuring the office layout and desk attributes, and a reporting module with pre-built analyses for utilisation by zone, by team, by day of week, and by employee — the data foundation for space planning decisions.
The employee mobile app — available on both iOS and Android — was the primary user-facing product. Employees could view available desks on the office floor plan, filter by date, zone, and desk attributes (standing desk, quiet zone, near a specific team), book for individual days or recurring patterns, check in on arrival (via QR code at the desk or GPS proximity detection), and see their current points balance and reward options.
The gamification system was built as a discrete module with a configurable points economy: administrators could set points values for different actions (booking and checking in, consistent attendance, leaving feedback) and configure the available rewards and their redemption costs. The points ledger used PostgreSQL transactions to ensure accurate accounting under concurrent load. Employee-facing points history and reward redemption were surfaced in the mobile app through a dedicated rewards tab.
The backend API, built on Node.js, served both the admin dashboard and the mobile app from a single unified API layer. This architectural choice simplified data consistency guarantees and reduced the operational complexity of maintaining separate backends for different frontends.
Technical approach
The full stack comprised React for the admin dashboard, React Native for the mobile app, Node.js/Express for the backend API, and PostgreSQL for all persistent data storage. The platform was deployed on AWS using a combination of EC2 for the application servers, RDS for PostgreSQL, ElastiCache for session management, and S3 for static asset storage.
The check-in system's GPS proximity detection used the Haversine formula to determine whether a user's reported location was within a configurable radius of the desk they had booked, with a fallback to QR code scanning for environments where GPS accuracy was insufficient (common in buildings with deep floor plans or multiple basement levels). The radius and fallback behaviour were configurable per-venue.
The reporting module used a pre-aggregation pattern: rather than computing analytics on demand from the raw booking data (which would have been slow at scale), the system ran scheduled aggregation jobs that materialised the metrics most commonly needed by workplace managers into summary tables. Report page loads were then served from these pre-computed tables, with real-time data available at the raw booking level for ad-hoc queries.
Results
Hydesq launched its first production clients during the second half of the engagement period, with the full feature set — admin dashboard, mobile app, and gamification — delivered and functional. The product received positive feedback from early workplace manager users, who highlighted the reporting depth and the configurability of the rewards system as standout features.
The gamification mechanic achieved its intended effect in the pilot deployments: check-in rates — the critical metric for ensuring that booking data reflected actual usage rather than ghost bookings — were significantly higher in the Hydesq pilot than the industry average for desk booking products without gamification. This directly addressed the data quality problem that undermines most desk booking platforms: if users book but don't check in, the utilisation data becomes meaningless and the business case for space planning collapses. The rewards incentive created a self-reinforcing loop between data quality and product value.
Alexander B.'s assessment was that the Squash Apps team delivered the full scope within the budget and timeline, maintained quality at each stage of the build, and provided advisory value beyond the delivery scope. The engagement continued into an ongoing maintenance and feature development relationship.
As a reference case for workplace management SaaS development, Hydesq demonstrates the full scope of what a dedicated product build engagement can deliver for an early-stage founder: not just code, but product advisory, UX design, architecture decisions, and the discipline to ship a multi-product platform (admin web app, mobile app, gamification engine, reporting module) within a startup budget. For PropTech startups, workplace technology companies, and founders building desk booking or office management software, this engagement outlines a realistic path from concept to production clients.