A neighbourhood swap shed, online.

The story

Hello. I'm Daniel, and I built SwapHarvest from my kitchen table in Ourimbah, on the NSW Central Coast. The honest origin story is a lemon tree. We have one out the back that, in a good year, carries more fruit than my family and I can possibly use. Every autumn I'd watch a few hundred lemons go soft on the grass and feel quietly terrible about it.

At the same time I knew that two streets over someone was probably scrolling the supermarket app looking for lemons, while somebody else's chooks were laying faster than the family could eat eggs. That mismatch is everywhere, especially in a part of the world like ours where so many people grow, bake, brew, or keep a small flock. It just needed a friendly way to be sorted out.

So SwapHarvest is that. You list what you have spare, you have a look at what your neighbours have spare, and you arrange a swap. No money changes hands. Goods for goods, one suburb at a time. It's a small idea and I've kept it small on purpose.

I am the only person working on it. There are no investors, no growth team, no clever algorithm trying to keep you in the app all evening. If I'm being honest, half the reason I built it was so my own lemons would stop wasting and I'd meet a few more neighbours in the process. The other half is that I genuinely think tools like this should exist and don't, and I've got just enough stubbornness to make one.

The site is built to be used in your suburb, on a phone, while you're standing in the garden working out what's actually ripe. It should feel less like a marketplace and more like a notice board at the community hall. If it ever stops feeling like that, please tell me, because I will have got something wrong.

Thanks for being here.

Daniel, Ourimbah NSW