Meridian Logistics had a compelling thesis: mid-market shippers were underserved by existing freight visibility tools, which were either too expensive or too complex for companies moving 500-5,000 shipments per month. They had raised a $4M seed round and needed to go from concept to production-ready platform in under 12 months. The technical challenges were significant. Real-time tracking required integrating with dozens of carrier APIs, each with different data formats, authentication methods, and reliability characteristics. The platform needed to handle bursty data — a single carrier webhook could deliver thousands of status updates in minutes — while maintaining sub-second query response times for the customer-facing dashboard. Meridian's founding team had deep logistics expertise but limited software engineering experience. They needed a technical partner who could make architectural decisions that would scale from their first 10 customers to their first 1,000.

We started with a 3-week discovery sprint to map the carrier integration landscape and define the data model. This upfront investment saved months of rework by identifying edge cases in carrier data that would have broken naive implementations. The platform was built on a three-tier architecture: an ingestion layer that normalized carrier data into a unified format, a processing layer that applied business rules and generated alerts, and a presentation layer that served the customer dashboard and API. For carrier integrations, we built an adapter framework that allowed new carriers to be added in 2-3 days instead of 2-3 weeks. Each adapter handled the carrier-specific quirks while producing standardized events. The real-time dashboard used WebSocket connections for live updates, with intelligent batching to prevent UI thrashing during high-volume periods. We implemented predictive ETA calculations using historical transit data, giving shippers better visibility than the carriers themselves provided. We also built the billing and onboarding systems, knowing that self-serve activation would be critical for Meridian's go-to-market strategy.