It started with a kid, some chooks, and a roadside table
Vendl began about 500 metres from our front door.
My daughter is ten. She keeps chooks, and like a lot of kids in rural Australia, she set up a little stall at the road to sell the eggs: a table, a handwritten sign, a cash tin, and the honesty of whoever happened to be driving past. It worked the way these stalls have always worked. You leave the eggs out, people take them, people pay. Most of the country runs on exactly this kind of quiet trust.
But two things kept going wrong, and they're the reason this exists.
We kept losing sales without knowing. She'd sell out by mid-morning and we'd have no idea until we walked down to refill and found an empty table. That meant hours of an empty stall, a sign still promising eggs that weren't there, and customers who'd driven up for nothing. Other times we'd wonder if anything had sold at all. From the house, we were guessing.
And people wanted to pay, but couldn't. More than once someone would mention they'd wished there was another way. They had no cash on them, nobody carries coins anymore, and they'd wanted the eggs but driven off without them. A sale lost, not because anyone was dishonest, but because a tin only takes one kind of money.
Neither problem was about trust. The honesty part already worked. The problem was that a table and a tin couldn't tell us what was happening, and couldn't take a payment when someone had no cash.
So we started building the thing we wished we'd had.
What we wanted
Nothing complicated. We wanted to know, from the house, when something sold and when we were running low, before a customer drove up to an empty stall. And we wanted a way for people to pay by card too, for the ones with no cash.
That's still the whole idea. Vendl is a QR code on the stall and an app on your phone. Customers scan, take what they're after, and pay. You get a message the moment something sells, your stock counts itself down, and you get a nudge before you run out. No one has to stand at the table. The honesty stays; the guessing goes.
Why it's for more than eggs
Once we'd built it for the egg stand, it was obvious it wasn't only about eggs.
The same table-and-tin setup is everywhere once you start noticing it: firewood stacked at a gate, flowers in buckets at the end of a driveway, honesty car parks, camp-ground ice and milk, community fridges, the lady down the road selling jam. All of it runs on the same trust, and all of it hits the same two walls. You can't see what's selling, and you can't take a payment when someone's got no cash.
So Vendl is for any of it. If you leave something out to sell and trust people to pay, it's for you.
Still a small thing, built by people who use it
We're just a normal Aussie family. We built this because we needed it, we run our own stall on it, and we're figuring out the rest as we go. Honestly, that is the best position to build something from. Every feature has to earn its place at a real stall, on a real phone, 500 metres up a real road.
If you run a stall of your own, we'd genuinely like to hear how it goes. The eggs, for the record, are still selling.
From the Vendl team, regional Australia