Starter Street
A parent-verified local marketplace where young entrepreneurs offer neighborhood services.
The Problem
Kids and teens have real skills — dog walking, yard care, tutoring, pet sitting — but no safe, structured way to offer them locally. Parents have no visibility or control. Neighbors have no way to discover or trust young providers.
The Solution
Starter Street is a full-stack service marketplace built for young entrepreneurs (ages 10–17). Every business requires parent verification before going live. Parents approve services, pricing, team members, and payouts. Customers can browse local youth providers by neighborhood, book services, leave reviews, and message providers — all within a safe, monitored platform. Providers can subscribe to Growth or Pro tiers for advanced features like custom branding, analytics, packages, and team management.
Current Status
Live (limited)
Tech Stack
Key Features
- Youth business profiles with parent verification and StarterScore trust metric
- Service listings with parent approval workflow before going live
- Multi-step booking flow with pet/service details and flexible payment methods
- Parent dashboard for approving services, payouts, team members, and monitoring messages
- Subscription tiers (Free / Growth / Pro) with Stripe checkout and discount codes
- Subscription packages — customers buy bundles of service credits from providers
- Real-time messaging with safety flagging and parent visibility
- Review and rating system tied to verified bookings
- Favorites and recurring booking setup for regular customers
- Team management — providers can add collaborators with role-based permissions
- Custom branding (logo, accent color) for Pro tier businesses
- Analytics dashboard with earnings, job history, and repeat customer rate
- Admin tools for managing discount codes and overriding StarterScores
- Proximity-based discovery with neighborhood and school community grouping
Key Learnings
Building a two-sided marketplace with a third stakeholder (parents) adds significant complexity to every flow — from onboarding to payouts. Designing for trust signals (verification badges, StarterScore, review count) was critical for customer conversion. The subscription tier system taught me how to gate features gracefully without alienating free users. Integrating Stripe for platform subscriptions while keeping peer-to-peer payments (Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, cash) simple was an interesting UX challenge.
Invest in Starter Street
If you're interested in exploring investment in Starter Street, I'm open to thoughtful conversations.
This is not a public raise or pitch — just an open door for the right conversations.
See something interesting?
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