Coolamon family put all on the line to try luck at new lifestyle, app Stint

Sam and Karlee Horan began discussing their desire to travel around Australia with their children Meikah, 10, and Teo, 6, in 2020 after Meikah under went brain surgery.

The surgery on top of losing several friends to things like suicide pushed the husband and wife duo to take a leap of faith, and in July of last year, the pair began packing their caravan for the ultimate journey.

"Our daughter has an intellectual disability but she also had brain surgery in August of 2020 in the middle of the Delta COVID outbreak and life is too short," Mrs Horan said.

"We seem to all be brought up to work our butts off our whole lives to then not live life and experience it.

"Life isn't guaranteed, we've lost a few friends to suicide and those sorts of things and they haven't been able to experience life so we said stuff it. Enjoy life now and if we have to work a bit harder later on in life so be it."

In other news

Prior to hitting the road, Mr Horan, who has been involved in the agricultural field for most of his life, came up with the idea of an app which would connect employers and employees around Australia.

"The decision to design and build the app came up between ordering the caravan and our travels," Mrs Horan said.

"Sam rang me one afternoon and said; 'how do people find work on the road?'

"We knew we would be working as we travelled around Australia, and he said; 'why don't we build an app where people can find work while travelling'."

Employers can download the Apple Store app, which they called Stint, where they pay a fee to post endless job advertisements that come up from full-time work to temporary work.

Employees then have free access to the app to view the job opportunities in their area.

"While there are platforms such as Seek and Facebook, we found that they were quite clunky and wanted to build something that could be of ease," Mrs Horan said.

"We designed it to be easily usable. If you're an employer or employee you create a profile kind of like Linked In.

"It's a paid app for the employer but they get a 14-day free trial. They can post as many ads as they want for positions, they put on the job description and then the employee will go through the jobs and swipe left or swipe right, a bit like Tinder."

The family has risked it all for a chance at making their dreams come true, having sold their house in Coolamon to fund the now fruitful project.

"We started the design phase before we had left for our travels," Mrs Horan said.

"The design took about six months, Sam searched app developers and we went with the top ten, and then chose Appetiser which is the third in Australia and we got in contact and proposed our idea.

"They don't necessarily accept everyone's ideas but they thought ours were good. "

Once finished with the design, Mr and Mrs Horan were given the total cost of the development.

"It was once we finished our design phase that they let us know how much it was going to cost and we may have had a slight heart attack," Mrs Horan said.

"To do Android, Web and Apple it was over $350,000. We obviously didn't have those funds, Sam and I are still quite young and it's hard to start up a new business.

"Sam was adamant we should give up but we had already put $40,000 into the design.

"We had a mortgage, we built our house in 2018 in Coolamon and I was sceptical of renting it out so I said; 'why don't we sell the house, we're still young we can bounce back'."

In a bid to cut costs down, the pair decided to do an app with Apple on its own, but will potentially expand in the future.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: