What’s new on LokalGig

Our AI gig writer is live in production. Paste rough notes in BM, EN, or rojak (e.g. “jual nasi lemak homemade, RM8 sepinggan, KL area only”) and it generates a full listing — title, category, description, tags, and suggested price range — in both languages.

This removes the single biggest friction for first-time sellers: staring at a blank form. First call measured at ~7 seconds and sub-RM 0.01 in cost. Free for every seller.

Try Paste & Polish →

A few weeks of live usage made the real shape of the product obvious: LokalGig isn’t trying to compete with Fiverr, Upwork, or Shopee. We’re building the place where first-time earners are onboarded and graduated— the digital launchpad for Malaysians who’ve never sold a service online before.

Beachhead: home-based F&B and craft sellers in urban Selangor and Johor Bahru. North-star metric: New Earners Activated per month — users who post a gig and confirm at least one paid WhatsApp booking within 90 days. Every feature we ship from here gets judged against that one number.

First-time earners are the most vulnerable to scams and platform risk, so we spent a full sprint on a reliability, security, and performance audit: auth stability fixes, RLS hardening across every table, rate limits on write paths, and a plain-language safe-dealing guide sourced from PDRM and CyberSecurity Malaysia advisories.

Read the safe-dealing guide →

We shipped the community layer: an honest About page, a plain-language FAQ, this News timeline, and a written set of community values. We want sellers (and future hires) to read these and know exactly what LokalGig stands for before they sign up — not after.

We started personally reaching out to home-based F&B sellers, tuition teachers, photographers, and craft makers — explaining what LokalGig is, asking them to try it, and listening. No ads, no influencer spend, no paid growth — just honest conversations in DMs and WhatsApp.

The most common feedback: “writing the description is the hardest part.”That one sentence is what became Paste & Polish two weeks later.

After a month of heads-down building, LokalGig is in production. The MVP ships with everything a first-time seller needs: profile, gig posting with markdown descriptions, bookmarks, search by category and state, WhatsApp handoff, BM/EN toggle, and dark/light theme — all free, zero commission.

Sign up and post your first gig →

Late March moved fast: WhatsApp handoff flow, BM/EN i18n across the whole app, search and filters, bookmarks, and a long list of small UX fixes. Every flow got tested on real phones (not just the laptop) with a handful of early testers, and anything that slowed a first-time seller down got cut before launch.

With the problem understood and the values written down, we started building. Stack picked for speed and solo-maintainability: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres + Auth + Storage), Tailwind, Vercel. First commits focused on the boring-but-critical parts — auth, RLS, and a gig posting form that feels fast on a cheap Android phone on 4G.

With the problems mapped, we sketched the shape of the answer: a mobile-first platform that speaks Bahasa Malaysia as a first-class language, hands off to WhatsApp for the actual conversation, takes zero commission, and is designed for the first gig — not the five-hundredth. No bidding wars, no foreign clients, no English-only forms.

Before writing a single line of code, we wrote down what we refuse to do. Never take a cut of seller earnings. Never sell user data. Never pretend to be bigger than we are. Build for the makcik selling kuih from her kitchen before we build for anyone else.

We earn trust instead of commission.

It started with a simple question: why do so many Malaysians with real skills — cooking, tutoring, baking, graphic design, tailoring — never earn a single ringgit online? We spoke to home-based sellers, scrolled through Facebook groups, and read every complaint thread we could find.

The answers were consistent. Existing platforms take a big cut, assume English fluency, expect a polished portfolio, and are built for pros competing globally — not for a makcik posting her first nasi lemak gig. That gap became LokalGig.