SaaS Platform — TaskForge Project Management
We took a founder's napkin sketch and turned it into a multi-tenant SaaS platform with 2,400 paying users and $38K monthly recurring revenue — in 10 months from first line of code to market traction.
The Challenge
TaskForge's founder had 15 years of experience managing construction projects and was frustrated with existing project management tools. Asana and Monday.com were built for marketing teams and software companies — none of them handled the reality of construction: multi-phase timelines with dependencies, subcontractor management, change orders, daily progress logs with photo documentation, and compliance tracking.
The founder had validated the concept with 40 construction companies and had verbal commitments from 12 to pay for a beta. What he needed was a technical partner to architect, build, and deploy the platform — not just execute on specs, but make technology decisions that would scale from 12 beta users to 10,000+ without a rebuild.
The key technical challenges were multi-tenancy (each construction company's data fully isolated), real-time collaboration on project boards, offline capability for field workers on job sites with spotty connectivity, and a billing system that supported per-seat pricing with annual contracts and usage-based add-ons.
Our Solution
We architected TaskForge as a multi-tenant application with row-level security in PostgreSQL — every query is automatically scoped to the tenant context, making data isolation bulletproof without the overhead of separate databases per customer. The application layer runs on Next.js with Payload CMS handling user management, subscription state, and admin operations.
The project management interface uses a custom board system designed for construction workflows: phases (not sprints), milestones with dependency chains, subcontractor assignment with limited access views, daily logs with photo attachments tagged to GPS coordinates, and a change order workflow with approval chains. Real-time collaboration uses Socket.io for instant updates — when a foreman updates a daily log on-site, the project manager sees it instantly in the office.
Stripe Billing handles the full subscription lifecycle: per-seat pricing across 3 tiers, annual contracts with prorated upgrades/downgrades, usage metering for storage and API calls, automated invoicing, and dunning for failed payments. The self-service portal lets companies manage seats, download invoices, and upgrade plans without contacting support.
Implementation Process
1
Architecture & Design(3 weeks)
Designed the multi-tenant data model, subscription architecture, and core UI. Created clickable prototypes validated with 5 of the 12 committed beta companies.
2
MVP Build(8 weeks)
Built the core platform: project boards, user management, real-time collaboration, photo-documented daily logs, and Stripe Billing integration.
3
Beta Launch(3 weeks)
Deployed to AWS, onboarded 12 beta companies, collected feedback daily, and iterated on the most critical workflow issues.
4
Public Launch & Scale(Ongoing)
Launched publicly with content marketing, Product Hunt, and construction industry forums. Scaled infrastructure, added offline mode, and began Phase 2 features.
Results
TaskForge launched its paid beta 14 weeks after the project started. All 12 committed companies converted to paying customers. Word of mouth in the construction industry did the rest.
2,400
Paying users
Across 180 construction companies in 10 months
$38K MRR
Monthly revenue
From $0 to $38K MRR with <5% monthly churn
99.97%
Uptime
3 incidents in 10 months, all resolved within 30 minutes
14 weeks
Time to first revenue
MVP launched with 12 paying beta companies
NPS 67
Net Promoter Score
Well above SaaS benchmark of 30-40
Technology Stack
N
Next.js 15
Application frontend with SSR and client-side collaboration
P
Payload CMS 3
User management, admin panel, and API layer
P
PostgreSQL 16
Multi-tenant database with row-level security
S
Stripe Billing
Subscriptions, metering, invoicing, and dunning
S
Socket.io
Real-time collaboration on project boards
A
AWS (ECS + S3 + CloudFront)
Hosting, file storage, and CDN
Ready to Start?
No commitments. Tell us what you need and we'll tell you how we'd solve it.
“I talked to three development shops before idataweb. They were the only ones who pushed back on my feature list and said 'let's ship fewer features that actually work well.' That discipline is why we had paying customers 14 weeks later instead of still building 14 months later.”
— Founder & CEO, TaskForge
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