Just before the Christmas holidays of 2016 we received good news from Natuur en Milieufederatie Utrecht (NMU). We got €5.000,- to develop a pilot for 7DaysCircular and to work on a prototype for Warenhuisje. Once we set a date with a primary school in Utrecht for the project week on circular economy, we put the peddle to the metal to have a first version of the platform ready by mid March of 2017.

Because of the time and money constraints we researched some open source and cloud solutions that we could use as a base. The fact that marketplaces are not new was an advantage to us, but far from a ready made solution to the product we had in mind. Co-creating with kids and families is super important to us, so we take a step by step lean startup approach making the most of the possibilities we got in order to get them involved as quickly as possible. 

We stripped down the marketplace template we used to go back to the basics and make it more suitable for kids. We also focused on implementing some of the most important features that distinguish Warenhuisje/sCoolMakers from existing platforms:

• Private, members only platform: families have to sign up to be part of the community
• Friends only peer-to-peer trading: only when you’re connected you can see each other’s online shop – or as wel call it: ‘space’ – and message each other to negotiate a trade. 
• Local and social limits: you can see a short profile of the members within your city to connect with. There are no profiles visible from other cities. We want kids and families to have the possibility to meet and that’s why we put an emphasis on local. However if you have friends or family in other areas, you can send an invite via mail to form a social circle of friends to trade with.