DreamLabs
DreamLabs
[Case study]
Private, native app for internal contractor management
Shipped a native mobile app for poets and a desktop web app for admins in eight weeks.
Flutter, Firebase, HubSpot, Zapier, Figma, Notion
1 year+
[What it is]
Haikuists sends typewriter poets to weddings, brand activations and private events to write personalized haiku for guests on vintage typewriters. DreamLabs built the company’s private operations tool: a native Flutter mobile app for its contract poets and a desktop web app for its admins, sharing one Firebase back end. We shipped the first version of both products in eight weeks, and our work with Haikuists has spanned more than a year.
Haikuists started on a Brooklyn street corner, typing free haiku for passers-by on vintage typewriters. By its own count it now has a roster of more than 150 poets in over thirty major cities across North America, and writes at hundreds of events a year. The poets are contractors, so the business runs on coordination.
Each event sets off a chain of small tasks between the booking team and a poet: an invitation, an answer on availability, questions before the day, requests for supporting materials, and an invoice once the event is done. Haikuists kept its event records in HubSpot, while the conversations around them were spread across various apps.
In his Clutch review, co-founder Erick Szentmiklosy set out the goals: improve the workflow for more than 100 contract poets, make the manager more efficient at coordinating the business, consolidate communication from those various apps, and reduce the number of steps in every interaction.
[How it works]
Two products for two user types, built in three phases. Both are private: Haikuists’ app privacy policy describes the app as being for the booking team and its contract poets only, to schedule and coordinate performances.
For poets: a native mobile app
In the screens below, the poet app’s home screen lists upcoming and past events, each marked completed, pending or cancelled, alongside tabs for messages and the poet’s profile.
For admins: a desktop web app
The admin app shown below is organized around Events, Poets, Invoice and Messaging. Its events table shows each event’s date, location, invited poets and offers, and each event page records details such as attire and the point of contact.
Both products are built in Flutter: the poet side as a native Flutter mobile app, the admin side as a desktop web app. Firebase is the shared back end. Event records start in HubSpot and reach Firebase through automation, with Zapier in the automation layer. Figma and Notion carried the design and planning work.
The engagement began in November 2023. We built the first version of both products in eight weeks across three phases of work, and Haikuists’ privacy policy for the app took effect on January 26, 2024. Work continued after that first release; in all, the engagement has run for more than a year.
Haikuists got a tool built around its own workflow. Poets handle invitations, availability, questions and invoices in their app, and the booking team runs events, poets, invoices and messages from the admin dashboard, with event data arriving from HubSpot automatically. Asked about results on Clutch, the co-founder pointed to the app itself and its ability to serve the specific needs Haikuists had asked for.
[Don’t just take our word for it]
Erick Szentmiklosy
Co-founder @ Haikuists
“They are absolute rockstars”
They delivered on time every single time. They talked us through various options for each request and helped us to understand our problems more intimately. Their forcing us to translate our needs into "app-speak" gave us further clarity on what we were trying to accomplish.
[See for yourself]
There is no public download, so the Loom demo is the way to see the app.
