Community business directory platform with claimable listings and digital editions
A Laravel API and native iOS app combining a searchable local business directory with a digital publication — listings can exist before their owner ever signs up and be claimed later, while an editorial blog and issue-based digital editions give consumers a reason to open the app between searches.
A directory carries a worse cold-start problem than most marketplaces: consumers won't use one with few listings, and businesses won't pay to join one with few consumers. Asking a business owner to register, build a profile, upload photos and enter opening hours before they've seen any value has a very low completion rate, and directory use itself is episodic — people visit when they need something specific, and an app with no reason to open between those moments eventually gets deleted.
Made the unclaimed listing a first-class concept instead of a workaround — a listing exists as its own record, with or without an owner, carrying an explicit unclaimed state, so the directory can be populated ahead of demand and become useful to consumers immediately. Business owners then take ownership through a dedicated claim flow, turning a high-abandonment registration into a short verification step.
To give consumers a non-directory reason to open the app, built editorial content and issue-based digital editions into the same product rather than as a separate tool. Opening hours went through successive schema representations before settling on a structured JSON format that can actually express real-world scheduling — variable days, multiple periods, exceptions — and subscription plans and their feature details are stored as data rather than hard-coded, so packaging can change without a deployment. Model-level caching sits on categories, plans and content pages, since they're read on almost every request and change rarely.
The directory could launch already useful, because listings existed before businesses ever engaged with the platform. Business onboarding became a claim instead of a registration, opening hours became genuinely searchable instead of unusable free text, and discovery was never gated by payment — paid tiers add prominence and capability without controlling whether a business exists in the directory at all.
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