About Buurted

Our story

It started at our kitchen table. We are Banu and Caner, and we live in Weesp.

It didn't take long to notice something: most people in a neighbourhood are looking for the same things at the same time, and nobody can find each other easily. There's the neighbourhood newsletter, a handful of WhatsApp groups, and separate apps for buying and selling.

It became clear when our son needed a bigger bike. The one in our shed had gone too small for him. Two halves of the same problem, and both halves were on our own street. A family nearby had outgrown exactly the bike we were looking for, and a child nearby would have fitted ours perfectly.

We sold ours the way everyone here does: a photo in the WhatsApp group. It worked. It usually does. But it works the way shouting down the street works. Whoever is looking at their phone in that minute sees it, and by the next morning it has scrolled away.

So the bigger bike we ended up buying new. In a box, from a shop, while it was almost certainly standing in a shed two streets away.

That's the moment Buurted really started. Not as an idea, but as a small kind of frustration. If our own street couldn't find itself, something as simple as a WhatsApp group clearly wasn't enough. What it needed was a place of its own: close enough to walk to, familiar enough to trust, and useful for more than just selling things. That's what we set out to build.

Why Buurted

Buurted is buurt — the Dutch word for neighbourhood — with an English ending stuck on it: a buurt that has already happened to itself. Neighbourhoods, connected. Buurted. It exists to create connections, support local businesses, and stay close to what matters on your own street.

How it works

Some apps are a feed where selling shows up as an afterthought. Others are a real community with no way to actually trade. Buurted starts from both instincts at once.

You put something up with a few photos and the details that matter, and it appears to the people who live closest to you rather than to the whole country. From there, everything happens in one conversation: someone saves it, asks a question, makes an offer, you agree a time, you reserve it for them, and it's marked sold once it's been picked up. Paying is whatever suits the two of you — cash in the hand, or a Tikkie after you have checked the item at handover. We stay out of it. No checkout to get through, no shipping label to print. The handover is a five-minute walk.

And a buurt is not a shop, so Buurted is not only a place to sell. It's where you ask whether anyone has a ladder for an hour, find out why the road is closed, hear which electrician actually turns up, and see what the bakery is doing this weekend. The buurtposts and the local businesses sit in the same app as the listings, deliberately — because the neighbour you buy the bike from is the same neighbour who knows the electrician.

Core neighbourhood features are free to use. Optional listing boosts and business services are paid. We want to build something useful that the neighbourhood can trust.

Trust, and how we keep it

A local marketplace needs care. AI-assisted tools help us analyse and categorise listings and identify possible policy violations. These checks are not a guarantee: users should stay alert, and reports help us review problems and take action.

The rest is ordinary neighbourly decency: describe things honestly, answer your messages, turn up when you said you would. If something looks wrong, report it and we'll look at it. That's what keeps a buurt worth being in.

Sustainability

Giving things a second life nearby can keep them in use longer and reduce the need for packaging and delivery. Walking round the corner to collect something is a small, practical way to reuse what is already there.

Buurted is live in Weesp. Your street is very likely already on it.

Download the app, look around your own few hundred metres, and put the first thing you no longer need in front of the people who live closest to you.

Explore your buurt.

Banu · Business & growth

Caner · Product & engineering