In Brazil's city of Curitiba, on-demand manicure and pedicure is very popular. Before Nailtime app, local freelance manicurists were organizing themselves via popular WhatsApp messenger. Operators would take orders from customers and contact several manicurists to determine their availability. This system started to be quite hard to manage as the popularity of the service grew.

Safety of manicurists was also an issue. In Curitiba, some parts of the city are less safe than others. Operators couldn't manage to check every order and determine safety levels. This resulted in occasional incidents and it became one of the primary issues the new app had to solve.

The second issue for us to tackle was that the manicurists would forget to arrive to an arranged meeting with their client. If the service was planned too far ahead, it was difficult for them to manage their schedule basically using only WhatsApp.

Considering the fact that there was already an established way of communication via WhatsApp, we decided to build only a small MVP to test the waters with an alternative approach. To further minimize costs, we avoided making surveys. Instead, deploying a viable prototype was faster and provided us with valuable feedback and data from real-world use. The Nailtime app for manicurists in the first version contained only the option to toggle their availability and a live chat with an operator (to cover the WhatsApp funcionality).

The app was unexpectedly well adopted. Nailtime management was very successful in presenting the benefits and very soon they started receiving large amounts of feedback and feature requests. We kept collecting and evaluating ideas for a while and then we decided that the time for building the second (full) version has come.

The social impact aspect of the project caught attention of local media. The Nailtime team attended and won Desafio Paraná competition beating more than 200 other projects. This success provided strong motivation for us to build the full version of the app that would try to solve the problems described in the first section: manicurist's safety and time management.

You can see the final product in the picture below. Nailtime now provides two apps: one for the clients and one for the manicurists. Each serves a different purpose and the system now works more autonomously with less interactions from operators needed.

To prevent stalking, manicurist's personal information is revealed only when connected with a client.

App for clients- safety?

With Uber-like approach, clients can see available manicurists on a map around them, which updates in real time. This sets fairly accurate expectations about their options and waiting time. Once they pick a service and the meeting address, we begin the search. We notify available manicurists in a defined radius one by one. If the first one won't respond or declines the offer, we ask the next one, and so on. This minimizes unnecessary notifications for manicurers and provides more balanced availability of the service.

Clients can create an account while we perfom the search. When a manicurist accepts the offer, their details show up on client's screen with a possiblity to accept or cancel the search. Once connected, client and chosen manicurist can communicate via in-app realtime chat.