handl

Students on every campus wants to get their work to be handled someone needs a poster designed tonight, someone else can knock it out in an hour but those matches get lost in WhatsApp groups and word-of-mouth, with no trust and no safe way to pay. We built Handl to fix that: a verified, escrow-protected marketplace where students list skills or post tasks, pay through Stripe with funds held until work is confirmed, and build a reputation that follows them through college. Using Next.js, Supabase, and Stripe, we built the whole flow for real — auth, bookings, live chat, payments, reviews not just a mockup. The hardest part was getting the escrow state machine right, making sure a booking only moves from paid to released when both sides actually confirm the job is done, so the trust we're promising is real, not just a UI badge.

What I learned

We learned that trust isn't one feature - it's verification, escrow, and reputation all working together, and missing any one piece breaks the whole promise. Technically, we learned to design for the unhappy path first: webhook failures, duplicate events, and real-time edge cases taught us far more than the happy path ever did. And building the real product instead of a mockup forced real scope discipline. Every feature had to earn its place under the deadline