The Lounge — Tattoo Marketplace
A three-sided tattoo marketplace: map-based discovery, structured booking with quote flows, and an artist merch shop.
The tattoo industry runs on Instagram and word of mouth, and neither works well. For clients, Instagram's tags are poor at surfacing artists by region or style — you can't reliably find every artist near you who does a given style, and there's no way to compare on price. Booking is just as broken: there's no standardized process, which is confusing for clients (especially first-timers, for whom the whole experience is intimidating) and disorganized for artists. And for artists — who are creatives first — the business side is a drain on time they'd rather spend making art, while their earning potential is largely capped at the chair.
A three-sided marketplace with three core modules:
- Artist & shop discovery — a map-based search where clients filter artists and shops by style, location, and pricing. Profiles can be seeded from a backend admin tool or claimed/created by artists themselves, and each links an Instagram feed so clients can see real, current examples of an artist's work.
- Booking & appointment management — structured intake where artists configure their own onboarding (reference uploads, a description of what the client wants, approximate size), tied to a real availability calendar. Clients book a slot, a deposit is collected at booking, and the platform handles full payment through the app. Because much tattoo work is custom and unpriced, there's a messaging-thread quote flow: the artist gathers context, then sends a formal quote card with an expiry timer so requests don't become a black hole. Push and email reminders go to both sides, and intake templates walk first-time clients through what to expect.
- Artist merchandise shop — lets artists license and sell their work as print-on-demand merchandise, both in their own storefront and a combined platform shop, opening a new revenue stream beyond tattooing. Fulfillment via a print-on-demand partner, with a 50/50 net revenue split and per-item pricing the artist defines.
Utah-first launch (active Salt Lake and Provo scenes, a manageable market to seed supply and refine onboarding) with national expansion to follow; native iOS at launch given the young, mobile-heavy, camera- and notification-dependent audience; fully artist-configurable deposits; an expiry-timer quote flow modeled loosely on how Etsy handles custom orders; and government-ID verification for artists claiming admin-seeded profiles.
Artist acquisition strategy — the classic marketplace cold-start problem, where you need supply before demand matters (a founding-artist free tier or referral incentive is on the table) — and merchandise returns/dispute policy, which has to align with whatever the print-on-demand partner actually supports.
Next.js + PostgreSQL, native iOS at launch (leaning Expo for eventual cross-platform), Stripe Connect for deposits/payments/payouts, Mapbox or Google Maps for discovery, the Instagram Graph API for feed integration, Resend for transactional email, and Cloudflare R2 / S3 for image storage.