Case Study · Marketplace · iOS & Android
A marketplace for construction equipment
A mobile app where members rent idle heavy equipment from fellow contractors.
Yard Club lets contractors track, order, and respond to rental requests right from their phones. Silicon Prime built the iOS and Android apps — and Yard Club was later acquired by Caterpillar.
$120M+
In equipment transactions
2,500
Construction pros
Caterpillar
Acquired · 2017
The Client
Idle equipment, put to work.
Yard Club is a destination where members conveniently and safely rent idle equipment from fellow contractors — designed to benefit equipment owners and renters alike, turning parked machines into income and putting the right gear on every job site.
The Challenge
Renting heavy equipment had to feel effortless.
Yard Club — later acquired by Caterpillar — needed a user-friendly app that let its customers easily rent the construction equipment that wasn't in use.
Owners needed a simple way to list machines and respond to requests; renters needed to find the right gear nearby and book it in a few taps. The experience had to be effortless on both sides of the marketplace.
The Process
A Squad that built exactly what the client wanted.
Working from the UI/UX design Yard Club provided and an API to build against, our Squad team developed a one-of-a-kind app that makes renting construction equipment simple — and kept the feedback loop tight.
Built to client's spec
We developed the front end from Yard Club's UI/UX design and API — true to exactly what they wanted.
iOS & Android apps
A one-of-a-kind app for both platforms that makes listing and renting equipment simple.
Daily builds
Fresh builds every day gave the client something real to react to — never a black box.
Fast turnaround
Feedback addressed and bugs often fixed by the next business day.
Build a mobile marketplace for heavy equipment — simple enough for a busy job site, powerful enough to catch Caterpillar's eye.
The Impact
A marketplace that scaled across a continent.
By 2016, Yard Club had helped 2,500 construction professionals manage over $120 million in equipment transactions across the United States and Canada. On the back of that success, Caterpillar acquired Yard Club.
$120M+
In transactions
Equipment rented through the marketplace by 2016.
2,500
Construction pros
Owners and renters active on the platform.
2
Countries served
Across the United States and Canada.
Caterpillar
Acquired Yard Club
The world's largest equipment maker bought it in.
Approach & Lessons
Building to someone else's spec, without going quiet.
Yard Club came to us with the UI/UX already designed and an API to build against. The tempting way to run an engagement like that is heads-down: take the spec, disappear for a few weeks, and hand back a finished build. We deliberately ran it the opposite way — a fresh build every single day for the client to touch and react to. The cost was real overhead: a working app had to exist and be shippable every day, not just at milestones, which is more discipline than a periodic demo.
When the client owns the design and the API, the risk isn't creativity — it's drift you don't discover until the end. A pixel read two ways, an endpoint that behaves a little differently than the doc implied: on a monthly cadence those hide for weeks. A daily build turns every one of them into a same-day question instead of a costly late-stage rework. The non-obvious lesson is that "build exactly what they asked for" is a communication problem more than a coding one — the daily artifact is what keeps a fixed spec from quietly diverging.
A daily-build rhythm only works if the other side shows up to it. It assumes a client who has the time and the authority to look at something every day and say what's off — as Yard Club did. Where the reviewer is remote, busy, or slow to decide, daily builds can turn into daily unread builds, and the overhead stops paying for itself; a tighter weekly loop would serve that team better. And building to a client-owned design and API means the experience is only ever as good as the spec we're handed — a deliberate limit of this model, not a bug in it.
Yard Club was acquired by Caterpillar in 2017 (see above). Reviewed June 2026.
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