Commfy

A local communities marketplace to help you find your people. Connecting all sides of the social ecosystem through community intelligence

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Inspiration

As an immigrant twice, I have struggled to find my people. Systemically, this is because it is difficult to organize easily, there are not enough places where community can be built, and existing apps focus on building directories, rather than discoverability and belonging.

What it does

Commfy helps people find communities that fit them, and gives the people who run those communities the tools to keep them going.

  • For people looking for community: you tell Commfy about yourself in your own words ("I'm new to London and want to join a run club") and it matches you to real London communities with something happening soon. "Your Week" gives you a short set of picks each week instead of an endless list.
  • For organisers: events and ticketing (the organiser keeps 100% of the ticket price), QR check-in at the door, announcements, polls and threads, sub-communities (a student union can run all its societies under one umbrella), and Request to Join: the organiser approves each place, can ask questions first, and for paid events the card is only held and charged on approval.
  • Tips on iPhone: members can tip an organiser through an Apple in-app purchase, handled by RevenueCat.
  • A full map from day one: over 1,000 London communities pulled in from Luma, Meetup, Eventbrite, Outsavvy, Fatsoma, parkrun and Design My Night, so the app is useful before anyone signs up. Organisers can claim their listing and run it on Commfy.

How we built it

  • App: React 19 wrapped in Capacitor 8 for iOS and Android, from one codebase. Web at get.commfy.app on Cloudflare Workers.
  • Backend: Supabase (Postgres, auth, realtime chat, edge functions).
  • Payments: Stripe Connect for tickets and card holds; RevenueCat for Apple in-app tips, with every purchase verified on our server against RevenueCat.
  • Matching: Azure OpenAI embeddings of each community and each person's own description, compared for fit.
  • Supply: scheduled import jobs on Azure Container Apps that refresh events daily.
  • Shipping: Codemagic builds iOS from GitHub (the whole thing was developed on Windows), Limrun for cloud iPhone testing, Sentry and PostHog for errors and analytics.

Challenges we ran into

  • Building an iOS app without a Mac: every iOS build and test ran in the cloud through Codemagic and Limrun.
  • App Review: a rejection on 19 September because the reviewer couldn't find the in-app purchases, which we answered with step-by-step instructions before resubmitting.
  • Tips and Apple's rules: a tip Apple has charged must never look like it failed. If saving it on our side fails, we still thank the person and retry in the background, with RevenueCat as the record.
  • Getting real events in: Incumbent apps spent significantly more in marketing and getting organizers to switch over requires sales touch points beyond claiming a community
  • A sign-up outage: a database hook bug blocked new sign-ups until we traced and fixed it at the source.
  • Dependencies moving under us: on submission day a new Sentry iOS release broke our build; we pinned the version and shipped.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • The iOS app was approved by Apple on 15 September, during Shipaton.
  • Over 1,000 real London communities are browsable, with events people can click through to.
  • Request to Join, including card holds that are only charged on approval, went from idea to live in a few days.
  • King's College London's student union societies run on Commfy as sub-communities, visible only to verified King's students.

What we learned

  • People search for community by situation and feeling ("new to London"), not by category, so matching on their own words works better than filters.
  • Organisers don't need another directory; they need the tools that keep people coming back after the first event.
  • Apple's rules for digital payments shape the product, so you design tips and upgrades around them from the start.
  • Pin your dependencies before a deadline.

What's next for Commfy

  • Launch the Android app on Google Play.
  • Short check-ins after events so organisers can see how their members feel and who is coming back.
  • A proper notification centre with settings people control.
  • Better matching that learns from what people join and skip.
  • Merch for communities, and more cities after London.

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