Loom Marketplace
Pre-seed two-sided marketplace · ~$80k GMV/mo
From a personal Stripe + Venmo to auditable Connect rails in 4 weeks
Stand up Stripe Connect with payouts, refunds, and dispute handling in 4 weeks.
A pre-seed marketplace had a working two-sided product but was running money through a founder's personal account. We migrated them to Stripe Connect with proper account onboarding, escrow holds, payouts, refunds, and dispute handling — all auditable.
Throughput
152/s
p95
20ms
Errors
0.04%
- Industry
- Marketplace
- Timeline
- 4 weeks
- Team
- 2
- Service
- Software + Web
- Project tier
- Custom Software / $14,995
The Problem
What was broken.
Pre-launch hack: founders processed payments through a personal Stripe account and Venmo'd the suppliers. Worked at small scale, was a regulatory time-bomb at any larger scale, and made unit-economics impossible to track.
Our Approach
How we framed it.
Migrated onboarding to Stripe Connect Express. Modeled every money movement as an event in Postgres with idempotency keys. Inngest workflows handle the slow side (payout schedules, dispute callbacks, refund timing). Built an internal admin where the founders can audit any single order's money trail.
Capability proof
What this case demonstrates.
This case makes the hidden work visible: strategy, architecture, delivery control, quality evidence, and handoff.
01 / Product judgment
Problem framed before UI
Pre-launch hack: founders processed payments through a personal Stripe account and Venmo'd the suppliers. Worked at small scale, was a regulatory time-bomb at any larger scale, and made unit-economics impossible to track.
02 / Technical depth
7 stack decisions
Stripe Connect (Express), Next.js 15, Postgres, Prisma, Inngest (event jobs), Zod
03 / Delivery discipline
4 delivery checkpoints
Money model + state machine / Connect onboarding + holds / Refunds + disputes + payouts
04 / Handoff quality
5 shipped artifacts
Stripe Connect Express onboarding flow / Escrow-style payment holds + release rules / Refund and dispute webhooks with retries
Production artifacts
Inspect the work behind the visible result.
Each case exposes the surfaces, systems, evidence, and handoff package that make the shipped product usable after launch.
Experience layer
Buyer or user surface
Stripe Connect Express onboarding with KYC handled by Stripe. Every money movement is an idempotent event in Postgres; founders can audit any single order's money trail.
Proof 01
Stand up Stripe Connect with payouts, refunds, and dispute handling in 4 weeks.
Proof 02
Wrote the order state machine on a whiteboard with the founders. Mapped every transition to a money event.
Proof 03
Stripe Connect Express onboarding flow
Production signals
Instrumented
Events and funnels named before handoff.
Risk-aware
Security and compliance boundaries named.
Release-ready
Deployment or store-release path included.
Before / after · product UI mockup
Industry · Marketplace
Before:Manual seller payouts via wire — 3 days lag, weekly reconciliation panic.
After:Stripe Connect Express onboarding with KYC handled by Stripe. Every money movement is an idempotent event in Postgres; founders can audit any single order's money trail.
How the engagement ran.
- 01Week 1
Money model + state machine
Wrote the order state machine on a whiteboard with the founders. Mapped every transition to a money event.
- 02Week 2
Connect onboarding + holds
Implemented Express onboarding, escrow holds via Stripe's separate-charges-and-transfers model.
- 03Week 3
Refunds + disputes + payouts
Wired the slow paths through Inngest workflows so retries and callbacks are first-class.
- 04Week 4
Admin + cutover
Built the internal audit tool. Cut over from the legacy account behind a feature flag.
- 1
Week 1
Money model + state machine
Wrote the order state machine on a whiteboard with the founders. Mapped every transition to a money event.
- 2
Week 2
Connect onboarding + holds
Implemented Express onboarding, escrow holds via Stripe's separate-charges-and-transfers model.
- 3
Week 3
Refunds + disputes + payouts
Wired the slow paths through Inngest workflows so retries and callbacks are first-class.
- 4
Week 4
Admin + cutover
Built the internal audit tool. Cut over from the legacy account behind a feature flag.
Deliverables
What we shipped.
- ✓Stripe Connect Express onboarding flow
- ✓Escrow-style payment holds + release rules
- ✓Refund and dispute webhooks with retries
- ✓Inngest workflows for payout schedules
- ✓Internal admin with full money-trail audit
Outcomes.
engagement targetsPlan: stripe Connect onboarding for suppliers; KYC handled by Stripe
Plan: escrow-style holds with clear release rules
Plan: refunds + dispute handling wired end-to-end
Plan: every money movement is an idempotent event in Postgres
Plan: internal admin to audit any order's money trail
Honest challenges
What we got wrong (or almost wrong).
The pretty version of any case study skips this part. We don't.
- 01
Stripe webhook ordering is not guaranteed; idempotent event handlers + a small reconciliation job catch the rare out-of-order case.
- 02
Express onboarding requires the supplier to complete KYC; built a nudging email sequence so the marketplace doesn't end up with half-onboarded suppliers.
- 03
Disputes mostly resolve in the buyer's favor in this category; we surfaced the dispute risk per supplier on the admin dashboard.
In our own words
Money movement should be one of the simplest things to reason about and one of the hardest things to get wrong. Modelling every event as idempotent and giving the founders an audit drawer for any single order made the marketplace investable, not just operable.
From the Hayaiti team
Engineering · design · security
Technical blueprint
How the work holds together.
Buyers should see that the visual layer is backed by architecture, quality gates, and operational ownership.
Experience
1Application
2Data
3Operations
4Security
5Stack used
7 technologiesRelated
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