Launching markkët

Hi! welcome to a new blog post, as we prepare to launch and host friends for NYC Tech Week, wanted to share about the journey here

A few years ago I moved to upstate New York, partly to get away from tech for a while and prance around the forest. I spent about a year and a half reconnecting with other parts of myself: art, production, video editing, screen printing, design, music, and physical creation again.

I wanted to launch a few online stores with friends, maybe sell prints, merch, experiments, media, and community projects, but every time I looked at the existing e-commerce platforms, something felt off

The tools were expensive, restrictive, overly complicated, or designed in ways that didn’t really fit how my friends and I wanted to work. And this was extra funny because I actually know people at many of those companies personally. I’ve hosted events with them, attended conferences, collaborated in startup ecosystems around them. I respect a lot of what they built

Still, I wanted something different, open source so I could run on my own infrastructure and the long-term roadmap

Something that could also allow friends and communities to launch their own websites and stores inside an ecosystem we collectively shape together

At first, I wasn’t even sure whether markkët would stay a side project or become something much larger, for months we had only an admin dashboard where I would manage everything

The core code was actually finished a long time ago. Our first successful transaction happened in early 2025. Since then, we’ve spent a lot of time quietly testing different versions of the platform, redesigning dashboards, refining interactions, rebuilding flows, testing creator experiences, and figuring out how to make ecommerce feel lighter, simpler, and more human again

Now we’re getting close

The current dashboard is something I’ve personally been using on my iPhone for weeks. We’re finishing the final details around payouts, subscriber management, buyer tools, creator onboarding, and an upcoming iOS app

The goal is simple:

Help artists, crafters, collectives, communities, startups, and weird internet people launch beautiful pages and sustainable businesses without needing massive budgets or giving away control of everything they build

Markkët is deeply influenced by the communities and ecosystems I’ve been lucky enough to be part of over the years, open source communities, Latin American founders, hackerspaces, creative scenes, raves, independent artists, zines, startup operators, and people building things because they genuinely care

This project has been growing slowly and organically, and I'm grateful for that. It gave me time to rethink what kind of technology I actually want to help bring into the world

Hopefully this encourages more people to create, experiment, collaborate, and launch their own corners of the internet again

More soon