From Prototype to Platform

Sustain Cities Network (SCN) Founder Sheryl Barbosa came to Coura knowing that people who want to support small green businesses often don’t know where to find them. Arriving with a local directory, a Replit prototype that helped her explain her idea, and a clear view of the problem she wanted to solve, Coura helped Sheryl turn that early concept into a focused first product for a self-funded pilot, giving her a live platform she used to build awareness, pursue funding, and earn early recognition for the business.

At a Glance

Client: Sustain Cities Network
Founder: Sheryl Barbosa
Focus: Connecting customers with small green businesses locally and nationally
Engagement: Product strategy, UX/UI design, and platform build

Engagement Outcomes

• A pilot built for public use: Coura designed and built the customer- and business-facing experiences SCN needed to launch before Thanksgiving, when shopping locally was already top of mind for many people.
• Local discovery that works while people are out: Search, business profiles, and a mobile-friendly map made it easier for someone looking for coffee, lunch, or a service to find participating businesses nearby.
• A first release with a stopping point: Sheryl and Coura identified what the pilot needed to do well, then set aside backend dashboards, administrative systems, and other future capabilities until the company had more funding and feedback.
• A more useful way to tell the story: The live product gave Sheryl something more persuasive than an explanation. She used it to show prospective users, funders, advisors, and program leaders how the business would work.

Product Limitations were Business Limitations

Sheryl began testing the SCN concept in Greenville, South Carolina, through a basic local directory built with a Clemson University intern. It had a search bar and a list of businesses, which was enough to test the premise without pretending it was a finished product.

Using Replit to make screens that put pictures to the words of the business, the prototype helped her communicate the idea to advisors and prospective partners, especially because explaining a network for local green businesses turned out to be more of a challenge than Sheryl had anticipated. A person can understand “shop local” and “shop green” separately, then still need to see the product before they understand how the two ideas come together.

That was the limit of the prototype’s usefulness. It was successful in clarifying the concept, but it couldn’t resolve the practical questions that came with putting SCN in front of real users.  

Businesses needed a way to apply and create profiles, while customers needed to be able to find them easily in the course of an ordinary day. The platform also needed to leave room for the larger network Sheryl intended to build, rather than creating a first version she would later have to undo.

“I knew that, especially after playing with AI, I was going to need a full-on development organization to help me, because in the grand scheme of things it was going to be a much larger database, data sync and platform.”

What the Pilot Needed to Solve

The first release had to work for two audiences with different reasons for showing up.

• Businesses needed a low-effort, understandable way to apply, join the network, and create a profile customers could use.
• Customers needed to find relevant businesses without turning a lunch or service search into an administrative task.

Sheryl was also self-funding the pilot and working toward a pre-holiday launch. The larger business would eventually need dashboards, data systems, and administrative tools, but the first release needed to do one thing especially well: make green local spending easier in the moment someone was deciding where to go.

Decisions That Shaped the Pilot

Prioritizing the Map

• Challenge
  A list of businesses was useful for research at home, but a chore to navigate for someone standing downtown, hungry, short on time, or trying to make a better choice without opening seven browser tabs.

• Coura’s approach
  Understanding that seeing proximity to a business was at the core of Sustain Cities’ product, Coura made map-based discovery central to the customer experience: customers could search with minimal effort, while businesses could create profiles that populated the directory and appeared in relevant results without a separate setup process.

• Result
  Customers could see participating businesses around them and move from intention to action with fewer steps.

Designing for Both Sides

• Challenge
  SCN had to support the businesses joining the network as carefully as it supported the customers finding them.

• Coura’s approach
  Coura shaped the customer and business journeys together, including business applications, profiles, search, and discovery. The team also surfaced useful profile considerations that Sheryl had not initially identified, helping the pilot reflect both immediate user needs and the larger network she intended to build.

• Result
  The launch gave businesses a clear way to participate and gave customers enough information to choose where to spend.

Keeping the Pilot a Pilot

• Challenge
  The full vision included backend dashboards and operational systems, but the first build had to fit a self-funded budget without becoming a temporary product Sheryl would need to replace later.

• Coura’s approach
  The team separated necessary front-end functionality from features that could wait for funding and real user feedback. Future needs stayed in view while the first release stayed within scope, a less glamorous discipline than adding features but usually the one that keeps an early product from becoming very expensive homework.

• Result  
  SCN launched before Thanksgiving with a complete public-facing experience and a clearer basis for the next phase of development.

“Everything was designed with the long-term vision in mind,” Sheryl said. “Instead of doing this setup one way, which would then cause us to have to go back and start all over again in the future, we were building upon what we already had instead of having to break something back down and start over from scratch again.”

From Explanation to Evidence

Before the platform launched, Sheryl often found herself trying to make people picture SCN through a pitch, comparisons, and increasingly refined explanations. Once Sheryl could pull up SCN to explain it, the business became that much easier for other people to understand how it meets users exactly where they are.

Prospective users could see how they might find a local business while they were already out, advisors and program leaders could follow the model without assembling it from a pitch, and people with technical experience could recognize the care that went into making the platform feel considered from the start.

As Sheryl began applying to programs and putting the company forward for recognition, the legibility of her idea became increasingly important. The platform gave her a concrete way to show what SCN was building, how businesses would participate, and what the customer experience would look like in practice. In those early stages, that made a concept that people had often struggled to picture easier to evaluate. In that early period, SCN was nominated among the top three organizations for a South Carolina sustainability innovation award and selected as one of 20 businesses, from roughly 300, to a final interview for an Orlando incubator pilot program, and was selected to participate in the Climatebase Fellowship program out of thousands of applicants. 

Sheryl put the value of the platform more directly: “I wouldn’t have been able to move forward at all with the venture without having this built out.”

With the technical work in capable hands, Sheryl could focus on launching the pilot, building awareness, finding relevant programs, and pursuing the funding required for the company’s next stage.

“It gave me the time and bandwidth to be able to go raise awareness, get the entire platform piloted and up and running, and find different types of programs.”

A Team, Until She Builds One

Sheryl was not looking for a developer who would take instructions, deliver a site, and become difficult to reach the minute it went live. She had worked with developers before and knew how quickly a polished deliverable could become a problem when the person who built it was the only one who knew how it worked.

She wanted a team that could explain its recommendations, show her what decisions meant for cost and timing, and build something to be handed to her internal team someday. 

“It was hands down one of the best experiences, if not the best experience I’ve ever had with any tech-oriented company at all,” Sheryl said. “Everything was explained simply, but with enough depth that I understood why we were making the decisions we were making.” 

SCN is continuing to pilot the platform and develop the funding case for its next phase. Sheryl has a product people can use now, a clearer view of what needs to come next, and a technical partner who can support the company as it grows.

“Coura was a fantastic partner through this. I felt like they were just as invested in my mission and vision and my company as I am.”

—

If you’ve used an early prototype to make your product idea easier to explain, Coura can help you work out what a first real release needs to do and how it should support the business you are building toward.

Reach out today.