Demand Aggregation
A doorstep recycling product built on cluster economics and the urban guilt of throwing things away.
Conscious urbanites feel a sting of psychic guilt every time they throw away non-standard waste like old electronics or packaging, but they ultimately do nothing because doing the right thing carries too high an "inconvenience tax" on their daily bandwidth.
Traditional recycling options fail because they demand consumer education and tedious sorting instead of providing operational luxury. From a business lens, individual low-volume household pickups lose money for vendors, meaning the market remains fundamentally uncoordinated.
I repositioned the product from an environmental recycling app into a hyper-local demand aggregation layer. I built a functional, 9-screen prototype that solves both sides of the marketplace with a single mechanic: For the user, a doorstep pickup only triggers when a 15-home neighborhood cluster confirms within a 400m radius. The vendor transforms a money-losing trip into a dense, highly predictable, and profitable Sunday run. Neither works without the other.
The full vision is city-scale with multi-vendor marketplaces and real-time on-demand routing. I cut automated scheduling, and complex tracking dashboards. Instead, I shipped a functional prototype of the absolute smallest version focused entirely on one neighborhood cluster and its core unit economics, because shipping beats scoping.
North Star: Sunday Repeat Pickup Rate (% of users booking a second pickup within 30 days). Directly measures if we've converted guilt into habit.
Supporting: Cluster Activation Time (days to 15-home threshold) and Eco-Credits Redemption Rate (% redeemed within 90 days).
Counter: Churn Post-First-Pickup. If the repeat rate looks good but this spikes, we've optimized acquisition over retention.
A/B test the anonymous Neighborhood Leaderboard's impact on cluster activation time. Hypothesis: gamified peer benchmarking + loss aversion compress the decision window. If it reduces time-to-15-homes by 2+ days, it becomes permanent. If not, strip it for a simpler progress bar.
This case explored: