Ludify

A startup project from inside DTU X-Tech — DTU’s entrepreneurship programme that pairs student teams with experienced founders and runs them through the early stages of building a company. Our mentor was the founder of GoMore, one of Denmark’s better-known marketplace successes (peer-to-peer car-sharing and ride-sharing), so a lot of what we worked on was shaped by what the marketplace playbook actually looks like in practice rather than in theory.

The idea

A TaskRabbit-style platform: a place where one person can post a small task they need done — assemble flat-pack furniture, walk a dog, pick up groceries, help move a couch — and another person nearby can offer to do it. Both sides trust the platform with the matching, the messaging, and the structure around the agreement; the platform takes a cut, both parties get on with their lives.

The Danish market didn’t have a clear leader in the space at the time, and our mentor’s GoMore experience shaped a lot of how we framed the product strategically: marketplace dynamics are about getting one side critical-mass first, and the early flow has to be ruthlessly simple or no one stays long enough to find the other side.

What we built

A web platform with the basic primitives you need for a two-sided marketplace:

• Post a task with category, location, time window, and budget. Posters can stay anonymous until they accept an offer.
• Browse and search tasks by category and location. The category set was tuned to match the kinds of jobs people in Copenhagen actually wanted help with.
• Offers and acceptance — taskers offer a price + short pitch; posters review and accept one. The accepted offer locks the task and opens up a private channel.
• In-app messaging between matched poster and tasker once an offer is accepted.
• Profiles and ratings — both posters and taskers build a track record, and the rating from each completed task feeds back into the next match.
• Auth + onboarding with email verification, so the platform’s reputation system actually means something.
• Localisation — Danish first, with the i18n plumbing in place to add English later.

A startup project lives or dies on iteration speed, so the build emphasised speed over polish in places — the goal was to put a working version in front of real users quickly enough that we could learn from how they used it.

Stack

• Next.js + React 17 + TypeScript — server-rendered React for the public listing pages (matters for SEO on a marketplace) with client-side interactivity for the authenticated parts.
• Chakra UI — the design system. Component-rich, themable, accessible, and fast to compose. Combined with chakra-ui-autocomplete for the location/category fields and framer-motion for the small interaction polish.
• Prisma — the ORM and schema source-of-truth. prisma-dbml-generator kept a DBML diagram in sync as the schema evolved (useful for whiteboarding the data model with non-engineers).
• NextAuth with the Prisma adapter — auth + session storage tied to the same database that owned the rest of the data. Email verification flows via nodemailer.
• Redux Toolkit + react-redux + redux-persist — client state for the multi-step task-posting flow, persisted across reloads so a half-typed task wasn’t lost if the user got distracted (a real issue in early user testing).
• react-hook-form + Yup — fast forms with schema validation; the resolvers package wires the two together.
• next-i18next — translations and locale routing for Danish/English.
• Axios for the HTTP layer; typeface-hk-grotesk for the brand typography.

Outcome

A working MVP demoed at the DTU X-Tech showcase and put in front of early users to validate the flow. The X-Tech programme’s value isn’t shipping a unicorn — it’s compressing the loop of “have an idea → confront its assumptions → learn what’s actually true.” Ludify did that, and what we learned from real users about the chicken-and-egg problem of two-sided marketplaces was worth more than any feature we could’ve built.