Barter Kitchen

Bring what you can do. Eat with someone who cooked. That was my pitch. Barter Kitchen was my idea for hyper-local, community-based exchange: dinners with strangers, but with a purpose. You trade work or a skill for food. Guitar lessons for a few dinners; fix a leaky faucet and eat at that table. A seat cost a barter (a skill, some goods, a service or just goodwill), never money. Food was the occasion; the real help was the point, and everyone came out ahead without a dollar changing hands.

How the barter worked

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A host posted a dinner: date, neighborhood, seats, a description, and "what the table runs on", whatever they needed help with or wanted in exchange. In the demo dinner it's a loaf of bread to swap.

A guest applied with an offer. That opened a chat where the two of them worked out a deal, and once both agreed the deal locked and the seat was confirmed. Only then did the guest get the exact address.

Money never moved through the platform; a listing that framed the meal as paid got blocked. Afterwards both sides could record whether the dinner happened and whether the barter was honored.

Dinners could be public, limited to the host's contacts with an invite code, or open only to members of a closed group. A trust-and-safety layer sat under all of it (optional ID verification, allergen-aware search, block lists, reports, moderation of listings).

How far it got

Further than a prototype. It was my first time using Claude for the whole thing, design and implementation both. I built it in about two weeks in May 2026, plus bits and bobs afterward to maintain it and add things. I had real users on it in production by late May and shipped a full trust-and-safety hardening pass in early June. Self-serve groups and a navigation redesign made it to staging and no further. I planned a mobile app and never started it.

It was a Next.js monorepo on Supabase; I gave it its own design system in a community-bulletin style (cream paper, ink, thin rules, serif headlines and a red rubber stamp). It worked in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

That's as far as it went. Nothing dramatic; I ran out of interest and time, and it's abandoned now.

If you're interested in bringing it back, reach out to me at ilse@corporateshill.com.