Lodge Marketplace: Private PWA for Student Residents
→ Introduction
Lodge Marketplace is a private PWA built for a small student residence community of around 40 residents. Students often move in for 6-24 months and need affordable basics such as furniture, kitchenware, lamps, books, electronics, and study gear. When they leave, they also need a simple way to sell or give those items away.
Before the project, exchanges happened through WhatsApp groups, paper notes, and chance conversations. That made items harder to find, reduced trust, and often led to usable goods being thrown away.
My role covered product strategy, UX/UI design, full-stack development, and project leadership. The product was designed as a private community utility: lightweight enough for daily resident use, but complete enough to support trust, moderation, realtime messaging, and repeated exchanges inside the building.
✕ Challenge
The main challenge was to replace informal resident-to-resident exchanges with a structured marketplace without overbuilding a public ecommerce platform.
On the resident side:
- Students needed to quickly find affordable or free items nearby.
- Sellers needed a simple way to post items before moving out.
- Buyers and sellers needed direct messaging without exposing the marketplace publicly.
- The experience had to feel fast, mobile-first, and easy for a non-technical community.
On the trust and operations side:
- Only approved residents should access the marketplace.
- Listings and users needed moderation flows.
- Reports, blocking, ratings, and profiles were needed to support community safety.
- Admins needed enough control to approve users, review listings, handle reports, and understand activity.
The product needed to stay intentionally focused: no payments, no shipping, no public discovery, and no unnecessary ecommerce complexity.
✓ Solution
I designed and built a full-stack private marketplace focused on the flows that matter inside a small residence: approval, browsing, posting, chatting, handover, rating, and moderation.
The solution is built around three core components:
🏠 Private Resident Marketplace
The resident-facing experience is mobile-first and optimized for quick item discovery. It provides:
- Invite-based signup with admin approval before marketplace access.
- Listing cards with photos, category, condition, price, and free/gift options.
- Listing status flow covering draft, pending, live, sold, and archived states.
💬 Realtime Trust and Safety Layer
The product includes community features that create accountability without adding heavy ecommerce workflows. It enables:
- Realtime 1:1 chat tied to specific listings.
- Resident profiles and ratings after a conversation has happened.
- Report and block flows to help residents handle safety issues inside a private community.
⚙️ Admin Dashboard and Full-Stack Architecture
The admin layer gives the residence a practical operating system for moderation and oversight. This setup includes:
- Protected admin screens for users, listings, reports, and analytics.
- Next.js App Router, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, and Zod.
- InsForge for PostgreSQL data, auth, storage, realtime messaging, and backend services.
- Middleware gates, row-level security, service-role admin routes, and image compression before upload.
★ Business Results
The project turned a loose community behavior into a dedicated digital product designed around privacy, speed, and trust.
Results for Residents
Residents now have a focused place to discover, list, and exchange items within their building.
- Reduced fragmented communication: Item discovery no longer depends on scattered WhatsApp messages or chance conversations.
- Clear exchange flow: Residents can browse listings, message sellers, mark items as sold, and rate interactions.
- Lower waste potential: Usable goods have a better chance of staying inside the residence instead of being discarded during move-outs.
Results for Community Operations
The admin experience gives the residence a clear way to keep the marketplace private and moderated.
- Private access control: Only approved residents can enter the marketplace.
- Moderation workflow: Admins can approve users, approve listings, review reports, and monitor activity.
- Focused MVP scope: Leaving out payments, shipping, SEO, and public discovery kept the product aligned with the real local use case.
No public production metrics are available yet, so the next measurement layer should track registration rate, live listings, successful handovers, active conversations, and unresolved reports after 24 hours.
↻ Project Timeline
From problem definition to delivery, the project was shaped through focused MVP decisions, product documentation, architecture planning, and iterative implementation.
Phase 1 - Discovery
Identified the resident exchange problem, current informal workflows, trust needs, and product constraints.
Phase 2 - Scope and UX Definition
Defined user roles, core flows, out-of-scope ecommerce features, data model, and moderation requirements.
Phase 3 - Full-Stack Development
Built the Next.
Phase 4 - Testing and Delivery
Verified auth gates, listing flows, chat behavior, moderation states, PWA behavior, deployment setup, seed data, and backup documentation.
Ready to transform your product?
Let's discuss how we can achieve similar results for your business. Contact me at paniagua.ian.de@gmail.com or book a call below.