Building a Marketplace for Domestic Workers, and the Weight of It
After the limo plugin, my next build carried a different kind of weight. MaidsMe Pro is a job marketplace for domestic workers…
MaidsMe Pro
The story of MaidsMe Pro, a WordPress marketplace I built to connect domestic workers with employers, with a privacy first design that protects a worker’s real phone number. Told step by step by a self taught maker, including the design I tore down and rebuilt.
This is a project series. The posts below are in order, starting from Part 1.
My First Marketplace Design: Two Logins and a Chat in the Middle
My first design for MaidsMe was symmetrical, and the symmetry felt like quality. Two kinds of users, so two of everything, a…
The Moment I Decided to Tear Down My Own Design
Tearing down your own working code is a specific kind of pain. Version one of MaidsMe worked, two login systems, two dashboards,…
The One Privacy Rule That Shaped the Whole Platform
Every platform has one rule that, if you trace it, explains half the codebase. For MaidsMe it is this, no worker’s phone…
The Hiring Flow That Gives Everyone Exactly What They Need
The teardown left MaidsMe with one central flow, and this post builds it end to end. An employer browses profiles without any…
Why No Profile Went Public Until a Human Approved It
Most platforms race content live, sign up, post, visible in seconds. MaidsMe does the opposite on purpose, a worker completes a profile…
Building Forms the Admin Can Shape, Not Ones Frozen in Code
A maid’s profile needs different fields from a driver’s. Cooking specialities for one, licence class for the other. The naive build hardcodes…
The Database, and the Tables I Deleted When I Changed Direction
By the second redesign, I had stopped thinking of the plugin as code with a database attached, and started seeing it truthfully,…
Why a Trust Platform Lives or Dies on How It Looks
A family hiring someone to work inside their home judges the platform in the first three seconds, before reading a word. If…
What Building MaidsMe Taught Me About Judgment Over Code
MaidsMe was the project where my hardest problems stopped being technical. The limo plugin taught me debugging, payments, and timing rules. This…