💡 Vendor Peer Referral Network

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Summary

Vendors can refer other vendors they know and trust to market managers. Brad taps "Refer a Vendor," enters a name and phone number, selects which market — the manager receives a referral notification with Brad's name as the referrer. This adds a trust signal to vendor applications, accelerates supply-side growth through warm introductions, and strengthens the vendor community within the platform.

Market Signal

Supply-side growth (vendor acquisition) is the hardest cold-start problem for marketplace platforms. No farmers market app offers vendor-to-vendor referrals. MarketSpread and ManageMyMarket handle vendor applications but rely on managers to recruit directly. Event management platforms (Eventbrite, etc.) use exhibitor referrals for supply growth. The farmers market domain has strong informal referral networks — vendors at markets know each other and frequently recommend stall neighbors to managers at other markets.

User Signal

The PRD targets 40 vendors at 3 months and 160 at 12 months — aggressive growth that requires multiple acquisition channels. The manager persona Maria manages 38 vendors and needs to fill roster gaps. The vendor persona Brad operates at multiple markets and knows vendors across the ecosystem. Existing idea #71 (SMS check-in for app-averse vendors) addresses vendor engagement friction; this idea addresses vendor discovery and acquisition — the step before engagement.

Technical Opportunity

The vendor-to-market join request flow (FR13) already exists as a data model. Referrals add a referrer_id field and a new referral domain event. The existing notification infrastructure (FCM via internal/notify/) handles manager notification of new referrals. The referral can optionally send an SMS invite to the referred vendor, leveraging SMS capability. Manager approval workflow (FR10) remains unchanged — the referral just adds context to the application.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	Simple form + notification; extends existing vendor-market join flow
Impact	med	Accelerates supply-side growth; strengthens vendor community
Urgency	med	Most valuable once the platform has an initial vendor community to seed referrals from

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: At pilot scale with 40 vendors and 5 markets, there's no critical mass for referrals. Vendors don't know each other well enough yet to refer.

Rebuttal: Farmers market vendors already have strong informal networks — they see the same faces at different markets every week. The referral feature captures existing behavior (word-of-mouth recommendations) in the platform rather than creating new behavior. Even at pilot scale, one vendor referring two friends creates meaningful supply growth. The feature is simple to build (one form + one notification) and can be dormant until the community is ready — low cost to ship, high option value.

Suggested Next Step

Add a "Refer a Vendor" action to the vendor profile or market detail screen in Epic 3 (Vendor Profile). Design the referral flow as a lightweight story: form → notification to manager → referral context on the vendor application review screen.