Mobile app, iOS and Android

BIND

A marketplace for home-based businesses: chefs, bakers, tailors and groomers. Sellers open a virtual store and unlock customer enquiries with coins.

Client: A founder in Mumbai
Sector: Local marketplace
What we built: Mobile app, iOS and Android
Time: About a year

The brief

Good home businesses are hard to find.

Home chefs, bakers, tailors, pet groomers and hair stylists do great work, but most of their customers find them by word of mouth. The founder wanted one place where people could find them nearby, see what they offer and get in touch.

He came to us with the brand already in place, so our work started at the product: how the marketplace would work, what it would look like, and building it for both app stores.

How we did it

01 Strategy

How the marketplace makes money.

In-app checkout would have meant handling payments for sellers no one had vetted. A commission would have meant tracking every sale, which is a lot for a first version. We proposed coins instead: buyers send enquiries for free, and sellers spend a coin to unlock each one. Every seller gets 10 coins on sign-up and buys more as business comes in.
02 Design

The whole app, before any code.

We prototyped every screen end to end in Figma: onboarding, sign-in, browsing by category, seller stores, enquiries and coins. Fixing the full scope up front gave the build a clear plan.
03 Activate

Built in sprints, launched on both stores.

We built the app in Flutter for iOS and Android, in sprints, adjusting as we went. Alongside it we made a landing page and ran app-install campaigns on Google for the launch on the Play Store and the App Store.

The key decision

Coins instead of checkout.

Sellers pay only for real enquiries, buyers never pay to ask, and the marketplace never holds money on behalf of sellers it cannot vet. It also kept the first version small enough to build and launch.