Stoop
A tool-lending directory, one block at a time.
What it was
Every household on my street owned its own step ladder, pressure washer, and stud finder, each one used maybe twice a year, while the guy three doors down already had one sitting in his garage. Nobody knew what their neighbors owned, and nobody wanted to knock on a stranger's door to ask.
What I did
I designed the simplest possible listing-and-request flow — post what you have, ask for what you need — and piloted it the low-tech way first: a real paper sign-up sheet taped to my own mailbox, to see if neighbors would even bother. They did, so I turned that flow into a small app scoped tightly to one street at a time, deliberately leaving out anything that made it feel like a marketplace rather than a neighborhood.
What changed
Within three weeks, most of the block had signed up. People started leaving tools on porches with sticky notes instead of texting to coordinate, which was never a feature I designed — just something neighbors invented once the trust was there.