The Problem
Vendors were already doing real business — food, products, services — almost entirely through informal channels: WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, whoever happened to already know them. There was no shared place to build a real storefront, get discovered by someone new, or be found for being good rather than loud or recent.
Most marketplace and social feeds also share a structural flaw: they favor recency so heavily that a genuinely well-reviewed listing from a few months ago becomes functionally invisible, buried under whatever posted an hour ago. Discovery ends up rewarding activity, not quality.
How the Feed Works
Every listing is scored with a Bayesian rating system — a way of ranking quality that accounts for how many reviews a listing actually has, so five reviews at 5 stars don't automatically outrank fifty reviews at 4.8. That score is denormalized directly onto the listing and recomputed each time a new review comes in, keeping ranking fast without recalculating everything on every read. Listings are then served from score-ordered indexes, so a strong listing keeps surfacing regardless of when it was posted.
Proximity is handled separately using H3, a hexagonal geospatial indexing system, at a resolution fine enough to distinguish nearby areas without needing exact GPS matching — and coarser hex tiers get pulled in on the fly when a search needs a wider radius. The two systems combine through a buffer-then-reshuffle pattern: quality filtering happens first, and only within that already-good set does proximity reorder results. Distance breaks ties — it never lets a mediocre nearby listing outrank a genuinely better one further away.
Vendor Tools
Every vendor gets a real storefront, not just a listing — a custom handle (@yourbrand), a shareable QR code for the storefront itself, and a dashboard to manage listings, incoming orders, and posts in one place. Listings sit in three categories — Food, Products, Services — and the platform takes zero commission on orders.
Infrastructure
The backend runs on Convex for real-time database queries and mutations, so listing updates and order status changes reflect immediately without a manual refresh. Images are served through Cloudflare's CDN, with cache rules specifically tuned so a failed upload doesn't get cached as if it had succeeded — a small detail, but the kind that causes real support headaches if it's missed.
Where It Stands
MVP shipped and public. Vendor onboarding is live right now, using a structured outreach and pitch framework built specifically for getting the first real vendors on the platform.