Building Gigwork: a hyperlocal platform for Kerala

Gigwork is one of the biggest and most rewarding projects I've worked on. It's a hyperlocal business directory and services platform for Kerala, built to help people find local businesses and services near them, and to help those businesses get found online.

When I started, I knew it would be more than a listing site. Users get their own system on the platform, payments run through a gateway, and a WhatsApp bot lets people find services in their own locality just by chatting. No app to install, no website to dig through. It gave me the chance to learn far more than I expected.

What I built

A user system. Businesses and users each have their own space on the platform, not just a static listing page.

Payment gateway integration. Real payments run through PhonePe, which meant handling the whole flow properly: initiating, confirming and reconciling transactions.

A WhatsApp bot for local discovery. Using Interakt's WhatsApp API, users can chat with the Gigwork bot to find services in their locality. Someone looking for a service nearby can just ask on WhatsApp, the app most people in Kerala already use every day, and get what they need right there.

Hyperlocal SEO. I built category and locality pages designed to rank for searches like 'cafe in Changanassery', because local search is where this kind of platform lives or dies.

The stack

The frontend is Next.js (App Router) deployed on Cloudflare's Edge Runtime, with a Hono.js backend. It's fast, cheap to run and easy to scale.

A bug that taught me a lot

Some pages weren't getting indexed by Google. After digging in, I found the cause: html2canvas was crashing on Cloudflare's Edge Runtime, and Next.js was silently injecting noindex tags into the affected pages. Nothing looked broken on the surface, but the pages were invisible to search engines.

Fixing it, along with caching issues, a missing sitemap and schema errors, taught me that SEO on a modern framework is as much an engineering problem as a content one.

What I took away

Gigwork pushed me well past the tutorial level. Payments, WhatsApp automation, edge deployment and technical SEO are things you only really learn by shipping them for real users.

The WhatsApp bot also changed how I think about product design: meet people where they already are, instead of asking them to come to you. It reinforced something I care about, which is building complete, real products for the Kerala market rather than toy projects.

You can see it live at gigwork.co.in.