57Places
Travel marketplace connecting travelers with African tour agencies.
Cold start solved via claimable agency profiles
ProductBackendInfrastructureInternal Tooling
CloudflareApplication-level cachingScheduled jobsInternal AI tooling
Problem
African tour agencies are difficult to discover online, and travelers struggle to compare tours across them.
What I built
57Places solves the marketplace cold start problem by creating agency profiles upfront, which agencies can later claim, so the marketplace has real content from day one instead of an empty directory.
Image heavy pages are optimized with Cloudflare object storage and image transformations, backed by application level caching and multiple scheduling models to keep the catalog fresh.
To seed content faster, I built internal AI-assisted tools that pull agency and tour details from posters and existing websites, rather than entering everything by hand.