Product — Verified-identity marketplace
Plugr
A verified-identity marketplace for Lagos's skilled tradespeople.
- Role
- Founder & CEO — design & product engineering
- Discipline
- Brand Identity
- Focus
- Product Design, Design System
- Status
- Live product
01The problem
Hiring an electrician or a plumber in Lagos runs on word of mouth and hope. You rarely know who is actually turning up, whether they are who they say they are, or whether your money is safe once it has left your hands. Plugr set out to close that gap: a marketplace where tradespeople are verified before they can take a job, and payment is held in escrow until the work is actually done.
02Key decisions
- 01
Verification is the product, not a feature. Plugr runs a four-part verification stack — NIN, liveness check, BVN and a guarantor — and the identity and interface had to make that legible before anything else did. A client should be able to tell, at a glance, that the person on the other side of the screen has been checked, because that certainty is the entire reason to use Plugr instead of a WhatsApp group.
- 02
Escrow had to feel like safety, not friction. Money held back is normally read as money at risk, so the payment flow was designed to keep the client oriented the whole way through — what has been paid, what is being held, and exactly what releases it.
- 03
I designed the core screens and the visual system alongside one other contributor, then directed AI-assisted development to build out the rest of the product from those references. Getting the system right first — type, colour, components, states — meant the rest of the build could be produced against it consistently instead of drifting screen by screen.
03How it’s built
- Product
- Next.jsReactTailwind CSS
- Backend
- NestJSPrismaPostgreSQL (Supabase)
- Messaging
- WhatsApp Cloud APIGemini
- Infrastructure
- Redis + BullMQRenderVercel
- Trust
- NIN identity verificationEscrow payments
- 01
Every job runs on an explicit state machine, from searching for a Plug through quote, escrow, arrival and confirmation to release. The server rejects illegal jumps, every transition is written to an audit trail, and a job's work state and money state live in separate fields, so a payment hiccup can never corrupt where the job actually is.
- 02
WhatsApp is a first-class surface, not a notification channel. Each transition emits a domain event, and the same event sends the same message whether the action came from the app or the bot. Every message is an approved Meta template referenced by name, so changing copy is a config change, not a deploy.
- 03
Money never depends on an AI's reading of a message. The bot uses Gemini for conversation, but accepting or declining a job or a quote is caught deterministically, gated on the job's current state, before the model ever sees it.
- 04
The guardrails live on the server: quotes under ₦500 are rejected, quotes over ₦200k are held for admin review, and the 24-hour quote expiry is enforced, not just displayed.
04Outcome
Brand identity, core screens and the visual system delivered, with the rest of the product built out from those references. Plugr is now live in Lagos.
