A marketplace you can drop into any small town
Replicable multi-vendor platform, Batesville as the pilot.
Our Little Block is a hyperlocal marketplace concept: every town gets its own directory, populated from the census-to-Main-Street gap. Batesville, Indiana is the first instance. The engineering challenge is making the platform truly replicable — drop a config in, run the CSV ingestion, and a storefront shows up.
What was going on
Small towns are under-served by both national directories (too generic) and bespoke sites (too expensive to maintain). Pamela leads research and community outreach in Batesville; Michael builds the platform that the next twenty towns will run on.
How I worked it
- 01
CSV-first onboarding. Businesses arrive as rows. A normalization job cleans phone / hours / categories and produces a live storefront with a "Claim this listing" workflow.
- 02
Stripe Connect for multi-vendor payouts. The platform takes a thin fee; money moves cleanly.
- 03
Auto-generated OG images per business. Marketing teams can share clean link previews without design work.
- 04
Every business gets an AI-drafted about block the owner can edit — first-mover content that doesn't feel spammy because the local owner has edit control from day one.
The parts worth naming
- CSV ingestion job
Normalizes messy civic data; flags duplicates; auto-routes claim requests.
- Storefront template
One component tree — skinnable per town via theme tokens.
- Vendor dashboard
Stripe Connect payouts, order management, promo tools.
What shipped
Batesville is in pre-launch / MVP. The platform is the product — Batesville proves the pattern.
- Town
- Batesville, IN (pilot)
- Businesses ingested
- [todo] {{TODO: confirm with Michael — 2026-04-23}}
- Claim-rate
- [todo] {{TODO: confirm with Michael — 2026-04-23}}
- Replicable
- Any town, one config
What it was built with
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind
- Prisma
- Supabase
- Stripe Connect
- HubSpot
- n8n