Plato

A marketplace connecting international students with home cooks from their own culture.

The Problem

I've been living in France for two years and there's so much Indian food I just cannot find here. It's not even about money - there are dishes I've looked for in actual restaurants and they just don't exist. And as a student you don't have a proper kitchen or the time to cook that kind of food yourself. So you just go without it. Which if you think about it is kind of a lonely feeling, especially when food is so tied to home.

The thought I kept coming back to was - somewhere in this city there's probably an Indian auntie who loves cooking and has a proper kitchen and would happily make this. There's just no way for us to find each other. That's the gap Plato is trying to close.

How It Was Built

Built using Claude Code, Supabase for the backend, and Vercel for hosting. No traditional coding - I built this entirely through AI-assisted development. To be honest this was also the first real product I ever built, so I was figuring out Claude Code at the same time as building with it.

What Was Built

Plato is a two-sided marketplace. Cooks list the meals they make. Students browse by cuisine, find food from their own culture, and order it. The whole idea is that the person craving something specific can actually find the person who makes it - and the transaction happens through the platform.

The Hard Part

The idea came easy because I'd lived the problem myself for two years. The hard part was that I had no coding background at all, and I was building something genuinely complicated - a full two-sided marketplace - while also learning the tool I was using to build it. There were a lot of moments where I genuinely had no idea what I was doing. But being that deep in it made me learn faster than I would have any other way.

Status

Currently in demo testing. Waitlist launching soon.