
One of my first jobs out of school was as the Sailing Administrator at Royal Brighton
Yacht club, where I was responsible for running many of the club regattas,
including state and national.

The largest pain points that emerged from my time in this role was the
need to manage and communicate with many Volunteers at once. Especially over the
course of an active regatta - where safety boats and radio towers all need to
work in unison.

To address this need, I took the initiative of creating a platform that I called
[Volunteer Roster](https://volunteerroster.com). A system for handling
registrations, documentation, and communication with a large number of
volunteers at once.

Volunteer Roster is now used by many Yacht Club around Australia, and progress
on its 5th major update is underway.


A SaaS for coordinating volunteers at yacht clubs

Volunteer Roster


Work in Progress... Watch this space 🔜⏳🚀


Dulux


# My role

My primary role on Fliteboard was as the Solutions Architect.
After multiple client workshops it became clear that we had to develop a custom
solution to deliver on the unique requirements that Fliteboard, and designing
that system was my responsibility.

I lead the project from a technical perspective, and developed the
infrastructure, pipeline, and backend with multiple payment gateways and a
fully unit tested API. The solution was then deployed in the form of a
statically compiled frontend, and an autoscaling backend deployed to AWS.

# The project

Early in 2019, [Fliteboard](https://fliteboard.com) received a large round of
funding, and with millions in presales, there was not yet a framework to build
and deliver products at scale. My team at [B.B.E](https://bbe.io) was engaged to
develop an ecommerce solution that would fulfill on pre-sales, for a market
launch in 90 days.

From brief to market launch, the site was completely rebuilt and launched with
global shipping and online sales in 13 regions.

<div class="markdown-video">
<video poster="https://fliteboard.com/video/fliteboard-hero-poster.png" autoplay="autoplay" playsinline="" muted="muted" loop="loop">
<source src="https://fliteboard.com/video/fliteboard-hero.webm" type="video/webm; codecs=vp9,vorbis">
<source src="https://fliteboard.com/video/fliteboard-hero.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>
</div>

With a complex product structure comprised of 9 individual components from a
pool of 20+ components, which in turn are each constructed from 100+ units,
there were 672 individual SKUs for each possible product bundle.

To solve this, I designed and implemented a solution in which products could be
effectively tracked by their components, but purchased as a single configurable
product by the customer.

<p class="markdown-image-md">
<img src="/images/work/fliteboard/poster-1.png">
</p>

This reduction in inventory management overheard contributed to successfully
forecasting sales and reducing lead time on orders from 3 months to 6 weeks.

# The results

- Rolled out to 13 regions
- On track to realise $17m in year 1 sales
- 175% increased revenue
- 426% increase in traffic
- 4901 assertions across 169 automated unit tests, covering all aspects of the API
- Reduction of server response time from 4-8 seconds, down to .0002 seconds, with automated and scalable hosting



A custom ecommerce solution across 13 regions