About
A hyperlocal marketplace app connecting South Asian communities across Europe and the United States with the businesses and services near them.
Project Brief
CoreDesi started as a website. Partway through, the team decided the idea needed to live as an app instead — one place for South Asian communities abroad to find local, culturally relevant businesses and services, and for those businesses to be found. We built it hybrid on React Native: one codebase, native apps on both iOS and Android.
The app centers on user-generated content — business listings, event pages, and direct messaging between users and the businesses they’re looking for. Backend infrastructure runs on Google’s platform for reliability at scale. Getting the interaction model right mattered more than any single feature. People needed to find what they were looking for quickly, with enough detail — photos, descriptions, reviews — to trust a listing they’d never seen in person. So the interface stays out of the way: photos and information lead, everything else supports.
CoreDesi has grown steadily since launch, with features added as the user base and its needs have grown — profile claims, buyer requests, and location-based discovery among them. It’s a good example of a project that changed shape mid-build, and of what it takes to make that change without losing time.
