By: Craig Lindahl
One of my fondest memories growing up was gardening with my mother. I learned from a very young age that the best meals come from the freshest ingredients, and there is nothing better than growing food yourself. So when Dan McCollister and Roberto Reiner reached out to us about their new produce sharing app, Cropswap, I couldn’t wait to find out more. Cropswap’s mission is to make neighborhood markets an alternative to supermarkets by bringing wholesome buyers and local gardeners together to buy, sell, or swap produce.
The Cropswapp app is built using our iOS SDK and features a map with custom user interactions and a unique look and feel to match the friendly neighborhood vibe of the brand. Custom markers with profile pictures make searching your local area feel more personal. You can filter by distance and click on each marker to open a grower’s profile, which show’s what’s available from their garden.
The Cropswap story begins with Dan who was in an Indie band for 9 years. He was outside one night picking kale from his garden and realized that he had way too much and no clue what to do with it. The idea hit him — what if there was a whole supermarket’s worth of food just in his neighborhood? That idea kept him up at night.
That’s where Rob came in. Rob is a talented developer with a few successful apps under his belt. After using Mapbox tools to build Cropswap and several of his other projects, he had some really nice things to say about us:
“Mapbox is the easiest way to get to market without wasting time manipulating maps. They have an excellent library of tutorials and answered questions to get anyone needing visual localization live as quickly as possible. Emails are responded within hours and you have the support of the awesome people at Mapbox! Would stand by the entire company hands down and proudly have their logo on our app!”
Having bootstrapped with rent money and grassroots fundraising, which included a reading marathon where Dan read classic novels on the internet for 24 straight hours, the two are ecstatic about the official launch of their app. To kick things off they’ve headed out on a cross country tour to promote cropswapping and to show off interesting gardens and gardeners along the way. They’re posting updates here.
Have a cool idea for an application that needs a custom map? Contact us and let us know what you’re building.
Cropswap: An app for selling your surplus was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.