Rapid Engineering Across the Stack for Lucho
Accelerating development across iOS, web, and backend infrastructure for a field service platform
The Challenge
Lucho, a Cincinnati-based startup building a crew management platform for landscaping companies, had technical founders working on their app, but still needed to move faster. With a complex product spanning iOS, web, and sophisticated backend infrastructure, they needed a partner who could accelerate development across the entire stack without slowing down to get up to speed.
The Problem
Building across iOS, web, backend APIs, and search infrastructure simultaneously—a broad technical scope requiring rapid context switching
The Goal
Accelerate toward launch by shipping features faster across the entire platform
The Timeline
3-month engagement delivering capabilities across multiple platforms
What We Did
Over three months, we worked across every layer of Lucho's tech stack. We jumped between iOS development, React web frontends, backend API work, database design, and search infrastructure. The value we brought wasn't just writing code, it was the ability to rapidly ship features across domains without needing months of onboarding.
1. Elasticsearch Implementation Across the Stack
The most impactful work was building search infrastructure using Elasticsearch—and making it work seamlessly across the backend, React web app, and iOS app. For a platform where crews need to quickly find jobs, messages, photos, and location data, search is absolutely core to the product.
In addiiton to being core to search in the short-term, our Elasticsearch implementation serves as the founation for future AI capabilities within Lucho, enabling intelligent recommendations and automation in the future.
2. iOS, Web, and Backend Development
We contributed across every part of the platform: native iOS features, React frontend work, backend API endpoints, and database architecture. The team could focus on product design and strategy while we brought their vision to life in code.
3. Agile, Rapid Iteration
Because we're comfortable context-switching between technologies and frameworks, we could move fast without getting blocked. Whether it was Swift for iOS, TypeScript for the web, or optimizing Elasticsearch queries, we picked up what we needed and kept shipping.
The Results
In just three months, we delivered features and infrastructure across every layer of Lucho's platform, helping to accelerate their progress toward launch significantly.
- Built Elasticsearch infrastructure from scratch and integrated it across backend, React web app, and native iOS app
- Delivered features across iOS, web frontend, backend APIs, and their database. This demonstrated the value of a team with broad technical range
- Laid groundwork for future AI capabilities by architecting search infrastructure with extensibility in mind
- Enabled the Lucho team to focus on product design and strategy while we handled technical execution
"Ascent took ownership of critical infrastructure work, including standing up and shaping our Elasticsearch foundation. That freed our team to stay focused on core product and design decisions. They operated independently, moved quickly, and gave us confidence that the technical base was being built the right way."
Need a team that can work across your entire stack?
Whether you're building an MVP, accelerating toward launch, or need to ship features faster, let's talk about how we can help.
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