Field-service software that proves every job, every night

Doorstep One runs valet trash: the nightly doorstep trash pickup at apartment communities, done by crews of porters across dozens of properties at once. Porters record every pickup with a photo, the time, and GPS. Operators run their routes and catch problems within the hour. Property managers get a report every morning. We saw the opportunity, built the product, and started the company that runs it.

Product: Doorstep One, for valet trash operators, their porters, and the property managers they serve
Built: A web platform, the porter app for iPhone and Android, a property manager portal, and a resident mode
Services: Product design, web and mobile development, operations and support
Stack: Laravel, React, Flutter, PostgreSQL, Stripe
Engagement: Since February 2026: designed, built, launched, and run by us

Results

109,000+
Doors serviced every night
1,000+
Users in the first three months
< 1 day
To move the first operator off its old system
2,000+
Requests a minute at the nightly peak

A porter beside the trash cart at night, checking off doors in the Doorstep One app

Our own company

We saw an opportunity, so we built the company

Most of our work is building software for clients. We are confident enough in what we build that when we see an opportunity, we build the company too. Doorstep One is ours: the product, the launch, and the business we run every night.

See the opportunity
Valet trash operators needed a way to prove every night of service to the properties they serve. We saw a product the industry needed and decided to build it ourselves.
Build the product
We designed and built the web platform, the porter app for iPhone and Android, the property manager portal, and the resident mode, with 8,400+ automated tests behind them.
Start the company
We founded Doorstep One, LLC in Atlanta in 2026 to sell and run it, with self-serve signup and billing from the start.
Launch and grow
The app went live in March 2026. The first operator moved over in less than a day, Doorstep One passed 1,000 users in three months, and it has more than 1,200 today across 109,000+ doors serviced every night.
Run it every night
We operate, support, and improve it ourselves: 58 releases in its first seven months, on a platform built to stay fast as it grows.

How a service night works

One night, from the schedule to the morning report

Valet trash happens at night, at dozens of properties at once, with no one from the office watching. Doorstep One makes every night provable.

Recorded in the product with a demo operator. The people and properties are made up; the screens are real.

Afternoon
The night is scheduled
The schedule board fills each route with its usual porters every afternoon. An operator covers the open nights, sets a one-night rate, or splits a route between porters.
6:40 PM
Residents know their porter is on site
Residents connect a phone by invite or QR code, with no account. They see the set-out window, get reminders and staff notices, and see when collection goes live.
7:04 PM to 7:42 PM
Every stop is documented
The porter starts the route, photographs the compactor on arrival and each door along the way, and reports a violation in a few taps. Every photo carries the time and GPS, and the app keeps working with no signal.
By 8:40 PM
Every property on one board
Operators watch every route move from pending to in progress to done and open any property's live map. Supervisors get the same watch on their phones, with late properties at the top.
Every hour
Problems are flagged while they can be fixed
The platform checks every route each hour for missed units, missing photos, routes finished too fast, and work outside the property’s boundary, and clears each flag once it is fixed.
6:00 AM
The report lands
Once routes, reviews, and uploads are done, every property manager gets the night’s report: every stop’s photos in route order and a page for each violation. Property managers never pay for it.

What we built

One product for everyone on a service night

Doorstep One is valet trash software for every person a service night touches: the operator, the porter, the property manager, and the resident.

Porter app
An app porters can run in the dark
iPhone and Android, in English and Spanish. It works offline, scans QR codes at each stop, and lets a whole crew work one route together.
Operations
One board for every property
A live tracker of every route, map replay of any past night, a schedule board, an exceptions inbox, and a review queue that shows who is reviewing what as it happens.
Property managers
Free reports and a portal
Property managers sign in free to see last night’s service, the map, violations, and monitored units, and get daily or monthly reports and one-page violation PDFs.
Residents
Reminders without an account
Residents connect a phone by invite or QR code for their pickup schedule, reminders, staff notices, and a way to report a service issue.

Also in the platform

A first route set up in under 10 minutes
Porter pay exported for Gusto, ADP, QuickBooks, and Paychex
Self-serve signup and Stripe billing

Under the hood

Built for the night shift

Routes run at night, often where the signal is weak, and every stop sends a photo and a GPS fix. The platform is built to stay fast and correct under that load, and the tests hold it there.

Offline
Built for bad signal
Porter actions queue on the phone and replay safely when the signal returns. Each change carries its own key, so a retry is never recorded twice, and a backlog of 50 GPS pings syncs in at most 6 database queries.
Efficiency
Query budgets pinned by tests
A porter’s GPS ping costs at most 6 database queries. Recalculating a 213-porter pay week once took about 5,500 database round trips; it now takes 30 or fewer at any size. Tests fail if either creeps up.
Quality
8,400+ automated tests
Tests cover the platform, the web app, and the porter app, and the PHP passes PHPStan at level 8 with no baseline of ignored errors. The porter app’s tests run on every pull request.
Traffic
2,000+ requests a minute at 9 PM, every night
The busiest hour of the month is the same hour every night: 9 PM Eastern, with about 170 porters on route. GPS pings make up more than half of the app’s API traffic in that hour.

AI in the product

AI where it earns its place

We add AI where it does a job better than code alone. Two features use it in production today.

Live
Violation reasons in Spanish
Each operator writes its own violation reasons. Claude translates them into Spanish so every porter can read them in the app.
Live, internal
Asking the data questions
An MCP server lets our team put questions about growth and operations to the platform’s data from Claude, without building a report for each one.