A small studio, one simple idea.

Why it exists

Getting a car detailed at home should be easy. In practice it means searching, calling three or four numbers, describing the same car each time and waiting to hear back. On the other side, a good mobile detailer spends evenings answering messages that go nowhere, or pays for “leads” that turn out to be the same request sold to several businesses at once.

LocalMatch is our attempt at the plain version. The driver describes the job once. Detailers who cover that town can read all of it. The ones who want it accept, at most 3 of them, and only then learn who the customer is. They each send a price. The driver picks one.

How it is built

LocalMatch is a WordPress plugin with this site wrapped around it. The request form, the lead inbox, the offers and the ratings all run on the site’s own server. Fonts and scripts are served from here too; the only outside services are OpenStreetMap for the directory map and Stripe for detailer payments.

The rule about contact details is enforced on the server and has its own automated tests, which try to get a customer’s name, phone and email out of every part of the system without accepting the lead. The tests ship with the tool.

The map on the home page is drawn from a simplified outline of the state made for this site, with a dot for each of the 169 towns in the tool’s town list. The ripples and arcs on it are an illustration of how a request travels, not a feed of real activity.

Where things stand

The marketplace is new. There is no count of detailers or completed jobs on this site because any number we printed today would be invented. While the directory is empty it shows a few profiles clearly marked “Sample listing”; they vanish when the first real detailer is approved. Screenshots across the site show an example request: the detailers in them are labeled “(sample listing)” and the customers “(example)”, the same words the tool uses.