Marketing experience
A polished, responsive Next.js site explains the marketplace vision and speaks to both travelers and prospective hosts.
Travel & CultureExperience MarketplacePlatform Foundation
Ancestra
A Culture-as-a-Service marketplace connecting travelers with verified Sri Lankan hosts and authentic local experiences.
- Role
- Product design & full-stack engineering
- Industry
- Tourism & culture
- Stage
- Beta
- Current delivery
- Marketing site · API foundation
- Platform
- Next.js frontend · NestJS API
- Status
- Marketplace in development
Overview
The story in brief
Ancestra is intended to be a Culture-as-a-Service marketplace where travelers discover authentic Sri Lankan cultural, rural, and tribal experiences, reserve a place, and connect directly with verified local hosts.
Today, the product is a polished marketing site paired with an early marketplace API. Registration, login, Google OAuth callbacks, forgot-password initiation, and contact integration establish the customer-facing foundation; the backend already models host profiles, categorized experiences, dates, galleries, capacity, and priced seats.
02
The challenge
Authentic cultural experiences are difficult for travelers to discover and evaluate, while local hosts lack a dedicated channel for presenting their businesses, publishing reliable schedules, and reaching the people looking for them.
The product must serve three distinct roles without losing trust: travelers need clear discovery and booking, hosts need approachable inventory tools, and administrators need safe oversight. At the same time, the experience must not promise commerce before reservations, payments, and confirmations are genuinely available.
03
The approach
We separated the product into a Next.js marketing and identity frontend and a NestJS API, allowing the public experience and marketplace domain to evolve independently behind one versioned contract.
The API establishes the real supply-side model first: users can own host business profiles, profiles can publish categorized and geolocated experiences, and each experience can carry dates, uploaded media, capacity, priced seats, and a lifecycle from draft to open or closed.
Delivery is staged around the product promise. First stabilize authentication, authorization, deployment, and host onboarding; then expose real open-event discovery and host tools; finally add concurrency-safe reservations, payments, confirmations, and administration.
04
What we built
What is working today, what the API already enables, and what remains to fulfill the marketplace promise.
01/08
web
Marketing experience
Identity foundation
Email registration and login, persistent JWT-cookie sessions, Google OAuth callbacks, and forgot-password initiation are partially integrated.
Contact integration
A validated public contact form connects the landing experience to Mailjet delivery for direct team enquiries.
Host profiles API
Hosts can be represented by owned business profiles, creating the backend foundation for verified public identities.
Experience inventory API
Experiences support categories, locations, lifecycle states, multiple dates, capacity, and generated priced seat inventory.
Experience media
Gallery records and local file uploads give the backend a path for hosts to attach visual content to their listings.
Discovery roadmap
The next marketplace layer will expose open experiences for public browsing, filtering, detail pages, and host discovery.
Commerce roadmap
Reservations, concurrency-safe seat holds, payments, confirmations, and cancellations remain planned rather than shipped.
Marketing experience
A polished, responsive Next.js site explains the marketplace vision and speaks to both travelers and prospective hosts.
Identity foundation
Email registration and login, persistent JWT-cookie sessions, Google OAuth callbacks, and forgot-password initiation are partially integrated.
Contact integration
A validated public contact form connects the landing experience to Mailjet delivery for direct team enquiries.
Host profiles API
Hosts can be represented by owned business profiles, creating the backend foundation for verified public identities.
Experience inventory API
Experiences support categories, locations, lifecycle states, multiple dates, capacity, and generated priced seat inventory.
Experience media
Gallery records and local file uploads give the backend a path for hosts to attach visual content to their listings.
Discovery roadmap
The next marketplace layer will expose open experiences for public browsing, filtering, detail pages, and host discovery.
Commerce roadmap
Reservations, concurrency-safe seat holds, payments, confirmations, and cancellations remain planned rather than shipped.
01 / 08
05
Under the hood
Hover a stack group to trace its path in the system
- Marketing frontend
- Next.js 16React 19Tailwind CSS 4
- Marketplace interfaces
- Traveler discovery – plannedHost workspace – planned
- Core API
- NestJS 11Prisma 7PostgreSQL
- Identity & integrations
- JWT + PassportRedisGoogle OAuthMailjet
- Infrastructure
- DockerNginxGitHub Actions CI/CD
Architecture
- conversion_pathA decoupled Next.js frontend communicates with the NestJS API through the versioned /api/v1 contract, with cookie-based authentication and automatic token refresh.
- conversion_pathPostgreSQL stores users, host profiles, categories, experiences, dates, galleries, and seat inventory; Redis currently supports password-reset tokens.
- conversion_pathMailjet handles reset and contact email, local storage holds uploaded experience media, and Docker plus GitHub Actions provide the deployment foundation.
06
The outcome
Beta · marketing site + API foundation
Beta
Current stage
4 repos
Core · Backend · Host · User
3 roles
Traveler · Host · Admin
6 phases
Path to finished product
Ancestra now has a substantially built public story and working contact flow, plus the core email and Google identity paths needed to begin onboarding its audience.
The backend establishes a meaningful marketplace foundation: host businesses, categorized and geolocated experiences, dates, galleries, capacity, pricing, and seat inventory are represented in one domain.
The product promise is not presented as finished: host tooling, public discovery, reservations, payments, administration, and production hardening remain the path from beta foundation to a usable end-to-end marketplace.
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