Item Hunt: Demand-Driven Marketplace
Buyers post what they need; verified sellers compete to provide it
Project Overview
Item Hunt flips traditional e-commerce around. Instead of sellers listing items for buyers to browse, buyers post what they need and verified sellers compete with offers—matched by category and location, with competitive pricing falling out of the bidding rather than being set up front. Built for the Kenyan market with verified sellers, category-and-area matching, email notifications, and a multi-language interface.
See it live at itemhunt.ike.work.
Status: v1 launch in progress
Item Hunt is built and deployed at itemhunt.ike.work for a v1 launch. The reverse-marketplace core works end to end—posting requests, competing offers, and the buyer's accept-and-compare flow. Seller verification (a paid annual plan plus ID checks) and email notifications are built and switch on once the payment, identity, and email provider credentials are provisioned.
The bet being tested is the model itself—whether a demand-driven, reverse marketplace can earn real space alongside established e-commerce, and where. The early read is that it's sharpest where incumbents are weakest: items buyers struggle to name or describe, custom or hard-to-find goods, and hyperlocal or specialty needs. The approach is deliberate—ship a complete, production-quality product first, then prove the concept against the market rather than guessing at it.
Key Features
- Reverse marketplace. Buyers post requests (title, description, budget, condition, location); sellers respond with competing offers. Public requests keep pricing honest, with a full status lifecycle on both requests and offers.
- Trust & verification. Buyers browse and post for free; sellers reach the approved state through a paid annual plan plus ID verification (identity checks with manual review) before they can make offers.
- Category & area matching. Requests are paired to sellers by category and a hierarchical location tree; a map-based radius search is a planned next step.
- Email notifications. Buyers are notified when offers arrive and sellers when new requests match their categories, via transactional email.
- Built for Kenya. Multi-language—English (US/UK), French, and Kiswahili—with browser detection and persistence, KES pricing, and a hierarchical category system.
Technology Stack
- Frontend: Next.js (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn/ui on Radix primitives, with dark mode.
- Backend: Supabase—PostgreSQL with row-level security, a hierarchical category + location model, transactional email via Edge Functions, and built-in auth (email/password + magic links).
- Platform: Firebase Hosting, full i18n routing middleware, and the usual SEO / PWA surface (Open Graph, sitemap, manifest).
The codebase is organised behind a clean service layer and a typed component library, with type-safe status enums and relational integrity enforced in the schema.
Skills Demonstrated
- Full-stack product build end-to-end: auth, a public request/offer transaction loop, seller verification, and i18n on a modern Next.js + Supabase stack.
- Trust & payments plumbing—seller verification (paid plan + ID checks) and transactional email, designed to switch on cleanly with provider credentials.
- Pragmatic system design—a service-layer architecture and type-safe schema that kept a feature-rich app maintainable.
- Product judgment—building a complete, production-quality proof of concept to validate the hypothesis against the real market.
Item Hunt is a full-stack, production-quality build in v1 launch. The clearest picture is the running product: itemhunt.ike.work.