Why a farmers market product, and why this one
I did not grow up behind a market table. I came to this trade the way a lot of software people do, through a favor. A friend took over as manager of a Saturday market with 38 stalls and asked whether I could look at her spreadsheet, because it had grown to eleven tabs and she had stopped trusting it. What I found was not a spreadsheet problem. It was four separate systems that all claimed to know who was at market: a site plan drawn in a slide deck, an application inbox, a cash envelope with names written on it in marker, and a Facebook post typed out fresh every Friday night.
She was not disorganized. She was doing the honest work of holding four things in agreement by hand, every week, for six months of the year. The week I watched her rebuild the map after a grower canceled on Thursday evening, I understood the shape of the product. It is not a booking engine, and it is certainly not a marketplace. It is one board that the map, the ledger and the public list all read from, so that changing something once changes it everywhere.
StallDeck came out of that first season and then out of two more spent with a county association that ran four markets under one roster. I sat in the manager tent at 5:40 in the morning. I carried the clipboard. I watched a vendor argue about a stall he was sure he had been promised, and I watched the argument end in eight seconds the first Saturday there was a dated record on a phone. That is the whole thesis of the product, and everything I have built since has been in service of it.
What I learned about this trade
Three things, and they shape every screen. The first is that market managers are not looking for more software, they are looking for fewer places to look. Any feature that adds a second source of truth is a step backwards, no matter how clever it is. So the board refuses to let the map, the ledger and the public list drift apart, and it will not let you publish a week that contradicts an assignment.
The second is that vendors are not the users. Managers are. A grower who has sold eggs at the same market for nineteen years is not going to install anything, and asking him to is how a market manager loses a Saturday to phone calls. So every action in StallDeck can be done by the manager on the vendor's behalf, in under a minute, and vendor accounts are strictly optional.
The third is about money and dignity. Stall fees are small numbers that matter enormously. A market that quietly loses four thousand dollars a season to unbilled stalls and unenforced no show fees is a market that cannot afford the second port a potty or the SNAP matching program. Getting the ledger right is not accounting hygiene, it is the difference between a program surviving the winter and not.
Experience and expertise
- Fourteen years building operational software for businesses that run on schedules, sites and physical space, most of it for teams under twenty people.
- Three full market seasons embedded with US market managers and one county association, on site and on the phone, from application season through the final winter market.
- Ongoing work with 318 markets on the board, from a 12 stall village market in Vermont to a 140 stall Saturday market with a paid staff of five.
- Direct experience with the paperwork that trips markets up: certificates of insurance, cottage food licenses, scale certifications, nursery permits, SNAP and Double Up reporting, and city vending permits.
- Publisher accountability through MLJ, SASU, the French company that owns and operates this product and every page on this domain.
How this product is built and maintained
StallDeck ships on a slow, deliberate cycle. Nothing goes out in June or July, because that is when markets are at full stretch and a change to the map screen at the wrong moment is a real problem for a real person at 6 a.m. Feature work lands between November and March, and the rest of the year is reserved for fixes, support and building maps for new markets.
Every feature starts with a manager describing a Saturday that went badly. I write down the sentence they used, and that sentence becomes the test. If a change does not make one of those sentences less likely to be said again, it does not get built, however good it looks in a demo. I keep a written record of every one of those sentences and review it before each release cycle.
The editorial standard for this site is the same as the product standard. Every number on the home page comes from a real figure I can trace: the 318 markets is the count of active accounts, the $1.9M is the sum of fees recorded through the ledger last season, and the outcome figures come from 96 markets that ran a full season and shared their before and after numbers with me directly. The testimonials are from named managers at named markets who read and approved their quote. When a number changes, I change it here. When I get something wrong, I correct the page and say what changed.
What I am accountable for
Support answers, uptime on market mornings, the accuracy of the fee ledger and the safety of your vendor records. If your board is down on a Saturday, that is on me and I want to hear about it while it is happening, not on Monday. Data handling on this site and in the product is described in plain language in the privacy policy, and the commercial terms are in the terms of service.
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. Tell me how many stalls you run, how you assign them today and what went wrong last season, and you will get a reply from me rather than from a support queue. If you would rather see the product first, book a walkthrough from the contact section on the home page.
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