What’s Next: Upcoming Innovations

 

Hello there!

As part of our ongoing commitment to empower communities and promote
sustainable living through shared resources, as outlined by Kenny in a recent post, we are continually innovating at ToolShare. I’m here to provide a detailed roadmap of
our upcoming developments, starting with our current standing and then diving
into our future plans.

We initiated ToolShare with a strong push to launch as quickly as we could.
We began by starting development of our software, but with the desire to launch
quickly, we decided to harness an off-the-shelf Software as a Service (or SaaS)
solution to expedite our rollout. Sharetribe emerged as our platform of choice,
and after a dedicated month of setting up, testing, and launching, the
ToolShare public beta was up and running.

With our platform live, we are now focusing on creating web wrapper apps for
Android, iPhone, and iPad. Our tests with Sharetribe revealed excellent mobile
performance, encouraging us to develop dedicated apps for each platform,
providing users with a comfortable, familiar mobile app experience with
ToolShare. We anticipate launching these in August, pending testing and
approval from the respective app stores.

Simultaneously, we are exploring the open-source version of Sharetribe, considering its potential for customisation and additional feature implementation. Upon completion of our investigation and subsequent testing, we will decide whether to migrate to the
open-source platform or forego that option.

Following the launch of our wrapper apps and concluding our evaluation of
the open-source project, our next objective will be to resume the development
of our custom rental marketplace. We plan to utilise a tech stack of C# and
.NET for this purpose, potentially incorporating .NET MAUI to enable app-based
mobile frontends, offering a richer experience beyond what a website wrapper
app is capable of. For our datastore, we’ll be leveraging Cosmos DB, a
document-based storage system offered by Microsoft on their Azure platform,
with which I have experience.

The initial development of this system has already begun, with the framework
of the backend now established. However, a bit more work is needed to ensure
optimal efficiency. By September, we aim to begin working on our own platform
again progressing from frontend to backend in phases and focusing on feature
implementation to bring our vision to life.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to sharing more
updates as we revolutionise how communities share resources. Stay tuned! If you
have any questions about ToolShare, either general questions, business
questions, or technical questions, please post a comment below and we will
promptly reply.

Try the ToolShare public beta for yourself now!