Context
CarryLB connects travellers who have spare room in their luggage with people who want a parcel carried between two cities or countries. The service is live at carrylb.com. Like any marketplace, it has to solve a cold-start problem: without travellers no sender comes, and the reverse.
The problem
Beyond the cold start, the central difficulty is trust.
- Two strangers have to agree to meet and hand over a parcel
- The sender does not want to pay before handover, the traveller does not want to carry without a payment guarantee
- Search has to cross a route, dates and available capacity, which is harder than keyword search
- Disputes, rare but inevitable, have to be arbitrable on evidence
The solution
A platform built around the listing and booking pair, with payment held until the parcel is handed over.
- Trip listings with origin, destination, dates and available capacity
- Search crossing route, period and parcel weight
- Profiles with history and reciprocal reviews after each transport
- Built-in messaging, so exchanges stay recorded on the platform
- Payment held and released on confirmation of handover
- Booking summary detailing price, weight and itinerary
My role
Product and data model design, API, interface, search engine, messaging, escrowed payment handling and cloud deployment.
Constraints
- Payment has to be held then released, which requires a more complex flow than a direct payment
- Search has to stay relevant with few listings, the situation of the first months
- Exchanges have to stay on the platform to be usable in a dispute
- Two sides to grow, with different interfaces and expectations
- International context: currencies, time zones, address formats
Outcome
A live marketplace where the full journey, publish a trip, be found, book, talk and get paid, works end to end.
- Escrowed payment removes the main objection on both sides
- Reciprocal reviews build the reputation that makes the service usable
- Recorded messaging gives something to arbitrate a dispute with
Outcomes are described by the capability delivered. No commercial performance metric is claimed here: usage figures belong to the client, and I do not publish numbers I cannot substantiate.