Bhaiji

The thing you want is nearby — you just can’t find it

Picture a Hot Wheels collector in Pune. The mainline car they want sits on a shelf in a local gift shop for a few rupees — but online, once delivery, platform fees and tax pile on, the same car climbs past ₹300–₹500. The shop across town has it. They just don’t know which one.

Or someone hunting a second-hand AC. A nearby store has one, but classifieds like OLX feel risky — you can’t gauge the seller, and driving across the city to inspect it burns your time, your fuel and a whole afternoon. New to a city, you don’t even know which shops to check. So most people give up and overpay online.

Bhaiji closes that gap. It’s a hyperlocal platform that turns the neighbourhood into a searchable catalogue. Shop owners list their inventory; a buyer searches for a product, instantly sees the nearby shops that stock it, then calls or messages the owner and picks it up in person. No marketplace markup, no travelling shop to shop, no guessing — local commerce the way it always worked, just without the hunting.

Designed, shipped and tested in 50 days

We started in January and had it live by mid-February — roughly 50 days, end to end. I was the only designer, so I owned all of it: research, user flows, the full UI, and a scalable Figma design system built from scratch (components, colour styles, typography, icons and variables) that the developers could build against without slowing down.

Speed mattered more than polish at the start, so we shipped a working version early and put it in real hands. That testing earned its keep. The clearest weak spot was right at the door: onboarding was split, and merchants kept ending up in buyer accounts by mistake. So I rebuilt it into one consistent entry — a single front door that flows everyone in smoothly, then branches to shop setup for merchants.

Watching real merchants onboard — with no help

After rebuilding onboarding into one consistent flow, I ran moderated usability sessions: real shopkeepers setting up their shop on camera, with zero guidance. The four clips below follow that merchant journey from start to finish — and the runs were seamless, which is exactly the result we were testing for. This is what proved the redesign worked.

Key Decisions

A few deliberate choices shaped everything that followed:

Search by need, not by store. People arrive with a product in mind, not a shop. So the whole app is built around one question — “what do you want?” — and answers it with the closest shops that actually have it in stock.

Talk to the shop, not a checkout. Instead of forcing a cart-and-payment flow, every listing leads straight to a call or message with the owner. It matches how local buying really works and gets people a fast, human reply.

One system, three platforms. A single Figma design system kept Web, iOS and Android visually consistent and let a tiny dev team move quickly — the same components and tokens everywhere, no drift between platforms.

Live, and growing

Bhaiji went from an idea to a product live on Web, the App Store and Google Play in 15 days — designed end to end by one person. Since launch it has crossed 10k+ users and 100,000+ product listings, and the user-flow tests after the redesign confirmed what mattered most: people move through it seamlessly. The reviews keep landing on the same words — clean, smooth, and a better way to buy than the big marketplaces.