Kildare Transition Year group develop innovative App
Aidan Ruane, Senan Nicholson, Marcus Cullen, James Barr
A GROUP of Transition Year students from north Kildare have developed an App to make hiring local service providers easier and safer.
Teammates James Barr, Marcus Cullen, Senan Nicholson and Aidan Ruane from Coláiste Chiarain in Leixlip have developed a mobile app called 'Hirely'. They describe it as a platform for a wide range of service providers – electricians, plumbers, tutors and babysitters - to connect and transact with clients.
Sixteen-year-old James Barr began designing the app nearly 3 months ago, after going on a holiday with his family to Malaysia. They used a local app called GRAB to hire taxis: “My parents kept going on about how useful it was, so that stuck with me,” said James. “But the competition was too stiff [in Ireland] to compete with the taxi market.” He looked into other problems that could be solved by this kind of app and realised he had found it difficult to get work as a babysitter.
To build the app, he had to teach himself how to code. Mr Barr is using the app builders Xano and FlutterFlow which pre-make the foundations of an app to make it quicker and easier to build. “It’s quite difficult but I expected that”, he said.
He remains dedicated to building the business, spending around 8 hours per week learning and building the prototype. The team is hoping to have 1,000 people signed up to trial the app for the competition.
James and his three other teammates, “would all love to be business owners or part-business owners” one day.
“I’ve tried to start a few businesses. I would love to be an entrepreneur,” said James.
The group are planning to enter the app in the TY Student Enterprise competition.
