Marktküche

Overview

Marketplace · Food

Marktküche is a discovery and pre-ordering platform for local farmers markets. The idea came from watching vendors at the Saturday market run out of the good stuff by 9am.

The hypothesis: if buyers could reserve items the night before, vendors would sell out faster and buyers would stop leaving empty-handed.

Timeline

1. Week 1

   Market research at 5 local markets

   Spent Saturday mornings talking to vendors and customers. Confirmed the timing problem is real and widespread.

2. Week 2

   Prototype with Google Forms

   Set up a simple pre-order form for one vendor. 12 orders in the first weekend. Vendor was visibly delighted.

3. Week 3

   Building the real thing

   Started on the actual web app. Vendor dashboard + customer-facing market pages. Stripe for payments.

Dashboard

Learnings

Talk to vendors before building anything. Every assumption I had about what they wanted was wrong.

The biggest surprise: vendors don't want a complex inventory system. They want to know how many of each item to bring. That's the whole job.

What worked: Starting with a Google Form prototype. Zero code, immediate validation, real user behavior data.

Still learning: How to get customers to adopt a new habit (pre-ordering) when the old habit (just showing up) mostly works fine.