Case Study - Hero CAD

HeroCAD was created to solve a clear operational problem within the dental design space: connecting labs with skilled freelance CAD designers through a structured, professional digital platform. My role in this project was as the full tech lead and developer, taking responsibility for shaping the platform from a technical and product-delivery perspective.

This included translating the business vision into a working system, defining the architecture, planning the feature set, and leading the build of the platform itself. The challenge with HeroCAD was that it was not a simple brochure site or standard service website.

It needed to function as a specialist two-sided platform, supporting both dental labs posting work and CAD designers receiving, managing, and delivering that work. That meant the product had to balance marketplace thinking, workflow clarity, strong user experience, and commercial scalability.

I led the technical direction of the platform by defining how the system should operate across onboarding, job creation, job allocation, designer workflows, and account management. The focus was on building something that felt clear and usable for both sides of the marketplace, while also ensuring the underlying structure could support future growth and additional features over time.

A major part of my work was taking a complex service model and turning it into a clear digital workflow. That included shaping the way users would move through the platform, how information would be captured, how jobs would be managed, and how the experience could feel efficient rather than admin-heavy.

The aim was to create a platform that improved speed, visibility, and reliability within a specialist industry that often still relies on fragmented communication and manual processes. As tech lead, I also drove the wider development approach, making decisions around stack, structure, scalability, and implementation.

My role was not just to write code, but to make sure the platform was being built properly from the ground up — with the right foundations in place for performance, maintainability, and future expansion. Alongside the build itself, I helped define the product in a way that made commercial sense.

HeroCAD needed to be more than a technical idea; it had to become a viable platform business. That meant ensuring the workflows, user roles, and feature set aligned with how the service would actually operate in the real world, while keeping the product clear enough to onboard users confidently.

The end result is a specialist platform proposition that brings structure to a highly operational process. HeroCAD positions itself as a modern dental CAD marketplace and workflow tool, giving labs and designers a far more joined-up way to manage work digitally.