Thank You

The Good: Wonderful experience, great people, beautiful location, and amazing horses.

The Bad: It was difficult to find a place to ride in our area, no way to book online, and credit cards not accepted.

The Ugly: We made over 25 calls to various locations over a two week period and only received one call back. We almost didn't find a place to ride for our anniversary.

Over the next few months, we visited many different horse farms to understand their booking, scheduling, and payment processes which involved paper schedules, payment via checks, and no integrated technology solution.

We also took many more riding lessons during this time to fully immerse ourselves in the experience and became equestrians in the process.

After a long search for the right team to build our site, we finally partnered with Codigo del Sur. Already having worked on the app for GrubHub, we were sure that they could handle our project.

Check out the team wearing our HeelsDown t-shirts at one of our daily standup meetings!

After understanding our site concept, we were ready to start laying things out to see what they would look like.

Here is an early wireframe showing how a customer would search for farms in their area.

It took three more months for the team to put all the pieces in place to create a working site that can be used to search, book, and pay for horse riding lessons online.

We were getting ready to launch our site with a great set of features including: the ability to search for a farm or trainer by name, showing search results using Google Maps, a rating and review system, user profiles pages, business profile pages, image galleries, horse profile pages, and online payments.

Over the next year, we worked to spread the word using social media as well as grassroots efforts. We traveled from farm to farm to sign up new businesses. We took pictures of the staff, location, and horses ourselves.

We would also take videos of our lessons at new farms, do our own video editing, and post the video on social media to help promote our site as well as the farm's business.

For most businesses, 2020 was a tough year and the equestrian industry was no exception. With most of the population staying indoors, bookings for outdoor activities slowed to a crawl.

We have a few ideas in the works. If you're interested in knowing what will come next, join our mailing list at the bottom of this page and we'll keep you posted!