Rise Gardens

Rise Gardens is a startup founded in Chicago. They create smart at-home gardens to make growing produce easy and fun. The garden uses hydroponic technology and is currently considered the most advanced product on its market. Meanwhile, the Rise Gardens app offers full-cycle plant care guidance and has a marketplace with everything necessary for that.

Dan, Rise Gardens’ CTO, collaborated with Brightgrove for many years before. So, he came to us with an MVP for this new project. The people who developed the MVP left the company, so Rise Gardens needed a new team to continue development and support the product.

We started by hiring a full-stack dev to take on the application the client already had. First, he focused more on supporting the app and slowly adding new features. Then, in 2021, we hired a QA specialist who introduced bug tracking and more in-depth analytics to the app. Later a back-end dev joined the team to work on the complex back end of the product deployed in AWS.

Then we took on a very important task: completely remaking the Rise Gardens mobile app. As we’ve mentioned, the client had an MVP, which meant complications with adding new functionality. Therefore, the better option was creating a new application from scratch. For this, we grew the team size to 5 people with another full-stack and a front-end dev.

One of the main functions we included is the Care Center. Here, users find all the tasks for caring for the plants, like adding water, fertilizer, etc. We can also collect gardening data with this function to analyze how people interact with their devices.

Our QA, who also functions as the lead of this team, is currently in talks with the client to maximize the use of this gardening data collected. Such data can be helpful for further analysis and application for other companies working in the home gardening industry.

We’re also integrating the store with the mobile app to allow in-app purchases of seedlings, nutrients, etc. We’re unifying the users’ accounts to achieve that. This means users will no longer have two separate accounts for the store and the gardening app. Now, all this will be possible with a single account. Such a feature also provides us user behavior data to improve the application.

We already have a roadmap of the next steps for this project. The client plans to introduce a garden subscription for people to try out the product and decide to purchase it in the future. Also, we plan to add gamification and networking features to the app to increase user engagement and retention.