Cbienlà.fr
Real-estate listing platform I co-founded in 2025, now live: a Flutter app and a Nuxt.js site on a shared Firebase backend.
A listing platform needs two front ends that never disagree: a mobile app people browse on, and a public web surface search engines can read. Both describe the same properties, so the hard part is one source of truth rather than two codebases drifting.
- Five co-founders and no revenue before launch, so build cost had to stay near zero at launch
- Listings must be indexable, since a client-only app would be invisible to search
- Same data model serving app and site
Firebase as the backend rather than a server we run
At this stage the scarce resource is our time, not compute. Managed auth, storage and functions removed an entire category of work, and the cost curve only becomes a problem at a volume that would be a good problem to have.
Nuxt for the public site, Flutter for the app
The two surfaces have genuinely different jobs. Nuxt server-renders listings so they can be indexed and shared; Flutter gives one mobile codebase for both platforms. Splitting by job beat forcing one technology across both.
Settle the business model before the product
Before Cbienlà I co-founded Facix, an activity booking platform for French associations. The app worked, but associations were not ready to pay for a service, so the company never took off. With Cbienlà, how the company earns its keep was a question from the first day, not something to solve once the product existed.
The data model was still shaped around the first screen we built rather than the queries we would need, and reshaping it later cost more than designing it up front would have.