“Dom worked flawlessly with the other vendors, even when they made it more difficult than it needed to be.”
Joe
Founder, PebbleSpaces
The Challenge
We sequenced the work around launch risk. First, protect the path customers and operators would touch: booking, payment, admin setup, access control, occupancy, live sessions, deployment, and QA. Once that path could carry real usage, the work expanded into the operating architecture for a hardware/software business.
House of Giants helped PebbleSpaces move from prototype stabilization to platform architecture. We connected the core customer and operator workflows across booking, payment, access, session state, support, and multi-location operations. The product had to stay useful when real people, real spaces, and real devices were involved.
Client
PebbleSpaces
Smart-workspace platform for booking and operating private physical spaces
Role
Tech Stack
The Problem
PebbleSpaces came to House of Giants with a product that created real opportunity and real launch risk.
The founder had a working-looking prototype for booking private physical spaces. Customers would scan, book, pay, unlock, use the space, and leave. On paper, that sounds like a booking app. In practice, it was a hardware/software product with payments, physical locks, occupancy signals, timers, QR codes, locations, events, admin tools, support fallbacks, device failures, and vendor dependencies.
If an unlock failed, someone could be standing outside a space they paid to use. A stale occupancy state could make the product lie about availability. A router failure could turn into a support problem. A QR code could become an operating decision when pods move between locations.
The first engagement had to protect that launch path before the team could make the larger platform calls.
What We Did
We did not treat the inherited prototype like a blank page. That would have been easier for us and worse for the business.
The launch-critical path came first: booking, payment, admin operations, access control, occupancy state, live sessions, deployment, and QA. The point was not architecture purity. It was giving PebbleSpaces enough production confidence to launch, learn, and avoid turning every real-world failure into a customer incident.
After the launch path stabilized, the question changed from "can this launch?" to "what operating system does this business need?" The larger rebuild moved the product away from a fragile app shape and toward an operating layer for locations, pods, events, devices, and support.
Deliverables
Tools for managing the day-to-day work behind each space, location, and session.
A customer path for finding a space, booking time, paying, starting a session, and ending it cleanly.
Coordination between the app and physical access systems so the experience worked in live spaces.
Operational state that helped the platform understand when a space was in use, available, or needed attention.
Tooling for running spaces across locations, events, reservations, and changing physical setups.
Clear customer and operator paths when something needed attention before, during, or after a booking.
Proof
In a normal SaaS product, a bug might mean a confused user or a failed form submit. That is bad enough.
PebbleSpaces had a different failure mode. The product touched doors, spaces, payments, devices, and people standing in real locations.
The use cases stretched quickly: business travelers taking 5 AM meetings, late-night voice recording sessions, and bookings lasting more than six hours. One 11 PM session came from a Comic-Con YouTuber with more than 250K subscribers. Different people were using the same product for very different reasons, but the thing they kept coming back to was privacy on demand.
That made reliability part of the product experience. If access, availability, or support drifted from reality, the promise of a private space broke. The platform had to be built for recovery, not only for the happy path.
How We Did It
The initial engagement focused on the smallest set of things that had to work for real customers and operators: booking, payment, admin setup, access control, occupancy, live sessions, deployment, and QA.
After the launch path was stable, the platform needed to support the real operating model: locations, events, sessions, device state, background work, live updates, and admin recovery.
As the business moved beyond the first launch, the questions became operational: how to add locations, move pods, manage reserved usage, recover from offline devices, and make the product usable for the people running it.
The relationship did not end when the app shipped. HoG stayed close enough to advise on hardening, security posture, replacement-system context, and the next version of the operating model.
Fast access feedback, low-latency occupancy updates, and long private sessions all had to feel like one simple experience. Users ranged from business travelers taking 5 AM meetings to 11 PM voice recording sessions for a Comic-Con YouTuber with more than 250K subscribers.
Why It Worked
Launch risk and platform risk were different problems.
Booking, payment, access control, occupancy state, live sessions, deployment, and QA needed immediate hardening because customers and operators would touch them first. Pod identity, maintenance state, event usage, manual fallbacks, vendor coordination, support workflows, and security posture needed enough architecture attention to avoid painting the product into a corner.
We stabilized before we rebuilt. We treated hardware as part of the product. We kept business reality close to engineering decisions. We built for recovery because spaces, hardware, networks, and vendors do not behave perfectly.
PebbleSpaces did not need a generic SaaS team. It needed product engineers who understood that software, hardware, operations, vendor dependencies, and founder judgment were all part of one system.
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