The marketplace connecting South Asian events with the right vendors.

icodelabs built the platform on Sharetribe Extended — configured as a lead generation and vendor discovery marketplace rather than a transactional one. There are no customer-to-vendor payments on the platform; the commercial model runs entirely on vendor subscriptions, with customers using the platform free of charge to find and inquire with event professionals.

The core technical differentiator of the build. When a customer submits an event inquiry, a custom proximity-based lead distribution engine built on MongoDB identifies and ranks qualified vendors by geographic distance from the event location. Leads are routed to the nearest vendors within the relevant service category — ensuring customers receive responses from professionals who can actually attend their event, and vendors receive leads within their serviceable area rather than irrelevant inquiries from across Canada.

Vendors access the lead pipeline through a subscription model — paying a recurring fee to receive customer inquiries matched to their service category, speciality, and location. Stripe handles subscription billing with plan management, auto-renewal, and cancellation logic built into the operator dashboard. Subscriptions gate lead access — only active subscribers receive proximity-matched inquiries — creating a clean commercial model where vendor revenue directly funds the platform.

A culture-driven browsing layer was built allowing customers to filter vendors by the South Asian community tradition their event belongs to — Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Pakistani, South Indian, Nepali, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi. This cultural filtering layer sits on top of Sharetribe's native search, surfacing vendors who have explicitly listed experience with specific cultural traditions — a differentiator no generic Canadian event marketplace offers.

A structured inquiry flow was built capturing the event details vendors need to give a meaningful response — event type, date, location, guest count, cultural tradition, and specific service requirements. This structured data collection improves lead quality significantly compared to open-ended contact forms, reducing the back-and-forth between customers and vendors and making each lead immediately actionable.

A rich vendor profile system was built on Sharetribe — covering service categories, cultural specialities, portfolio galleries, service area, pricing tiers, and customer reviews. Profiles serve as the vendor's public marketplace presence, discoverable through category browsing and culture-based search — giving vendors long-term visibility that compounds alongside their subscription-driven lead pipeline.

Sharetribe's native search was configured across all major South Asian event vendor categories — venues, decorators, photographers, DJs, caterers, mehndi artists, bridal makeup, entertainment, and event planners. Customers can browse by category, culture, location, and event type — creating multiple discovery paths into the vendor catalogue beyond search alone.

SendGrid was integrated for all transactional communications across the lead lifecycle — new lead notifications to vendors, inquiry confirmation to customers, subscription billing alerts, and vendor onboarding sequences. Automated email keeps both sides of the marketplace informed and engaged without requiring manual operator intervention at each step.