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If you’ve ever tried to find a plumber, a math tutor, or a pet sitter in Prague as a foreigner, you know the drill: scroll through half a dozen Facebook groups, post your request, and hope someone replies before it disappears under the next twenty posts.
For Laura, that exact frustration became the spark for Tool, a new app aiming to bring Prague’s tangle of local services under one roof.
Laura didn’t move to Prague for love, at least not at first. “There was nothing romantic about it… just a job offer,” she admits with a laugh. But the city won her over quickly. “It became a little more romantic after, as I fell in love with everything this city has to offer.”
What she didn’t fall in love with was the search for everyday help. As an expat, she was reluctant to constantly lean on Czech colleagues, so she found herself doing the legwork solo, hunting down a math tutor for her son, a plumber for an exploded kitchen tap, and a pet sitter before a holiday.
“The searching, comparing, calling, explaining things in my broken Czech hoping they spoke a bit of English was many times nerve-wracking and incredibly time-consuming,” she says. “All I wanted was one place where finding help would be simple.”
THE FACEBOOK GROUP PROBLEM
Tool’s marketing doesn’t mince words: “I refuse to waste time scrolling through Facebook groups to find help.”
Ask Laura what’s actually broken, and she paints a familiar picture for anyone who’s moved apartments in this city. Need a mover, a painter, a babysitter, a cleaner, and a handyman all before handing over the keys? Good luck figuring out where to look.
“Where do you find all these people? Many people go to Facebook groups. But which ones? Czech groups? Expat groups? How many? Three? Five? Ten?” she asks.
Post in the morning, and nobody sees it. Post in the afternoon, and it vanishes under twenty-five others.
“If you’re lucky, you get a useful recommendation. If you’re less lucky, two people start arguing in the comments and a third gives you life advice nobody asked for.”
Google, she adds, isn’t much better: a few searches, nine open tabs, several emails and phone calls, and the afternoon is gone.
“The help is out there. It’s just scattered everywhere.”
ONE APP, NOT THIRTEEN
Laura is well aware that Prague already has plenty of apps and websites for finding services. That’s precisely her point.
“I know at least two apps for pet sitting, three for tutors, two for cleaning, and a bunch for home repairs. Not to mention the number of websites.”
Her pitch for Tool is deceptively simple: put it all under one roof.
“‘One app for all services’ might not sound revolutionary, but imagine if it just worked,” she says. “When you need help, you shouldn’t have to juggle thirteen apps and fifty-six tabs to find it.”
Among the features she’s proudest of is built-in translation inside the app’s chat function: type in English, and the provider reads it in Czech, then replies in Czech while you read it in English.
Users can also filter for expat-friendly providers, upload photos or videos to explain a problem, filter by location, and compare prices.
“What I want to do is remove as many barriers as possible so people can just get things done,” she says.
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A YEAR IN, AND A SETBACK ALONG THE WAY
Ask Laura where she wants Tool to be in a year, and her answer is grounded rather than grandiose: to be the platform expats in the Czech Republic reach for first, “not the tenth.”
Success, to her, would be hearing a user say they found exactly what they needed on Tool in ten minutes.
Getting there hasn’t been easy. Laura has been working on Tool for more than a year, juggling evenings and weekends alongside a full-time job and rebuilding the app multiple times.
But the hardest moment, she says, wasn’t technical. It was personal: her partner stepped away from the project, leaving her to carry it alone.
“This forced me to rethink and replan the whole thing,” she says, something she did with a team who believe in the project as much as she does.
What keeps her going now, she says, is that small team, a conviction that she’s solving a problem worth solving, and, she adds with a smile, “quite a lot of stubbornness too.”
Asked to complete the sentence “I started Tool because…”, her answer sums up the whole pitch: “…all the time you spend chasing a cleaning lady in Facebook groups is better spent doing something you enjoy.”
Ready to stop scrolling and start finding help? Visit Tool and explore the services available in Prague.
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