Lab 04 / Marketplace · Hospitality · Trust
A dinner marketplace built
around trust at home.
Sofra is a Türkiye-first managed marketplace for scheduled dinners in verified households. Each table is inventory; the full evening — from welcome to tea — is the experience.
Context
The household is the venue, which makes trust the system. A marketplace for dinners in real homes has to design a warm consumer experience on top of a rigorous approval, privacy, booking, incident, and operating model — without exposing the household behind the table.
Constraint
Connect public discovery to host, guest, and operator workflows while deliberately separating public presentation from exact household and safety data.
MaydaLabs' exact scope
- The managed marketplace model: application, approval, scheduling, booking, oversight
- Public table discovery and guest journeys
- Host application and managed approval lifecycle
- Operator, booking, pricing, and incident surfaces
- Explicit public/private data projections
- A bilingual (English and Turkish) product architecture in one application
What was built
- A managed marketplace lifecycle: hosts apply, the platform approves, tables are scheduled, guests book, operators oversee — completion and reviews are explicit states
- A household privacy boundary: public projections show approximate area and product context while exact addresses, coordinates, dietary details, assessments, and safety data remain private
- One bilingual product system: EN and TR journeys share the same application, navigation, messages, host tools, guest account, and operator surfaces
- Demo-safe infrastructure: repository adapters and seeded journeys make the product testable without pretending production services, real payments, or real customers exist
Verifiable evidence
The captures below come from the fictional local demo: read-only journeys over seeded records, contacting no remote production service. They are product evidence, not evidence of real people or transactions. A deeper walkthrough is available in conversation.
Current status
Private Phase 1 in active development. No public launch, real booking volume, host network, or commercial outcome is claimed, and payments are not connected to real production processing.
Ownership
A MaydaLabs-owned lab product. Mehmet owns the product architecture and implementation, keeping demo evidence strictly separate from launch, payment, and customer claims.
What this is not
- No public launch, real booking volume, host network, or commercial outcome is claimed.
- Payments are not connected to real production processing.
- Demo records are product evidence, not evidence of real people or transactions.
- Brand, photography, policies, and operating choices remain open to iteration.


Building a marketplace where trust matters?