What we set out to do
Hyperlocal home food in Indian gated communities is a market everyone says doesn't exist — and that everyone in the community wants. Auntie cooks too much on Saturday. Anjali, three doors down, has an interview Monday and no time. Community Chulha is the marketplace where those two find each other without either of them having to start a business.
How we shipped
A DynamoDB-first stack on AWS — nine tables, careful access-pattern design upfront because we knew event volume would scale fast and bad schema decisions get more expensive every month. React + Vite on the front, Express on EC2 behind CloudFront. Firebase Auth so chefs could sign in from a phone they actually own. Push and WhatsApp notifications for when an order needs an answer right now.
What we learned
Trust is the feature. A buyer ordering biryani from someone four floors up needs three independent reasons to believe the kitchen is clean — verification, ratings, and a photo from a real neighbour. We rebuilt the chef onboarding flow twice to put trust at the top of the funnel, not the bottom.
Where it's going
The marketplace is live. The work right now is on conversion, notifications, and a verification gate that scales without us reviewing every chef ourselves.