Every change pushed to production since day one. We publish this because the platform IS the proof — talk is cheap, version history isn't. Each version below ties to real commits on the main branch and real features in the live product.
First commit to production. Appliance & Home gets a working layby system end-to-end: customers apply, staff approve, payments record, audit trails write.
The customer side gets a real face. The apply form is renamed and restructured, validations tighten, and WhatsApp template messaging is wired through Twilio for the first time.
First production day with real customers exposed real edges. Crystal incident — a stuck submit produced 9 duplicates — drove a deduplication fix. Email confirmations replace WhatsApp as the reliable channel.
The single biggest architectural shift. A&H becomes one of many — the system becomes a true multi-tenant platform. Per-host resolution, per-tenant branding, cross-tenant reporting, unified customer accounts.
Customers can browse before they apply. Layby Africa as a parent brand surfaces with the Atlas — the country-pipeline dashboard. Restapedic sandbox tenant lands as proof-of-concept for partner onboarding.
Polish day. Tenant agreement gets the physical-presence schedule (showroom / viewing-and-collection / pickup point tiers). Office partnership portrait ships for Steve's wall. Twilio adapter becomes env-switchable so we can route around Meta-side blocks.
The single highest-velocity day. Cracked the Meta WABA mystery (templates had been failing for two months with error 141008 — turned out the env var pointed at the wrong WABA). Built the inbox, the auto-reply, the supplier-invoice workflow, the Restapedic catalogue, the shop redesign, the apply form rewrite, and got auto-deploy live — all in one focused stretch.
The day after the night. Customer-facing edges that surfaced once real traffic hit the new shop — sold-out items being adoptable into cart only to fail at apply, promo cap blocking sales that should fall back to regular price, and the plan-step deposit being too quiet to register.
Two new storefronts land — Beds (full KDV mattress catalogue) and Horizon Solar. A cross-tenant marketplace surfaces every store in one place, the two-way WhatsApp inbox arrives on the layby detail page, and the apply form opens to the diaspora.
The platform's standout capability. An inbound WhatsApp payment screenshot is read by a vision model, matched to the right layby, and — when it's safe — activates it automatically. Zero staff touch on the happy path, with hard safety gates on everything else.
Real proof-of-payment traffic exposed every edge — duplicate screenshots, cross-customer fraud, app-vs-SMS shots of the same transaction. All closed. In parallel, the two-month WhatsApp template saga gets resolved.
Layby Africa stops being just a marketing surface. A dedicated operator console, a first-party / third-party operator split, and a clean two-entity story — the infrastructure company vs the Zimbabwe marketplace.
Groceries By ZimLayby lands as storefront #5. Laybys become true fixed-price contracts. The marketplace gets a unified cross-store cart, and collection logistics get real paperwork.
Pulled the live numbers and acted on them. Application activation was leaking because customers never learned how to pay — fixed by putting pay details on the success page and chasing cold applicants. Supplier reconciliation gets a real payables statement, and a deliberate pass removes dead features.
Two days, two thrusts. The cross-store marketplace was rebuilt from a brochure into an actual marketplace — categories, search, deals, instalment framing on every card. And the full deposit-chase stack went live: cold applicants now get chased automatically on email AND WhatsApp until they pay or expire.
Two weeks of parallel-track work: a native Flutter customer app on top of a brand-new token-authenticated mobile API. The app browses every store, shows cross-store laybys, and onboards new customers at apply time. It is built, signed and packaged — deliberately held from public launch until the payment gateway lands, so day-one users can pay in-app instead of being bounced to a bank transfer.
One focused day acting on a full system evaluation: close every cross-tenant exposure, make the money paths refuse to fail silently, and give the process itself crash discipline. Nothing here is a feature — all of it is why the features can be trusted.
The biggest customer-experience shift since launch. zimlayby.com now IS the marketplace — and a basket spanning any of the stores checks out as a single ZimLayby order with one reference code, one deposit, one payment. The WhatsApp number got smarter about serving every store at once, and the public faces now run on live numbers.
Supplier week. Capri got a full storefront built from their real brand and range for the partnership presentation; Restapedic's store was finished to catalog standard — every line live with real photos and marketing copy. And the storefront template finally treats phones as first-class: the filter wall is gone, the overflow is gone.
The marketplace grew up: OS-aware dark mode at token level, a branded fallback for products without photography, and Restapedic listed alongside Beds with a working size filter. Layby Africa's public pages were rewritten marketplace-first. And the first attempt at the pending-application problem shipped — a sweep that nudges anyone sitting unactivated for more than three weeks.
A week spent on the half of the business that is not customers. The team's work moved onto the platform: tasks with subtasks and per-person visibility, meetings with staged reminders, and capture straight from WhatsApp — message the business number in plain language and a task exists. No keywords, no syntax. Alongside it, cross-store checkout let one basket become one order across several storefronts.
VSC Interiors joined Sofa & Couch as a supplier, which exposed how much of the catalogue plumbing was assumed rather than built: the storefront supplier filter existed but had never had data behind it, and products.supplier was free text drifting away from the supplier table. Both were fixed properly. Product photography now gets classified and cropped rather than shown as supplied.
820 approved applications had never been activated. The cause was the deposit: 20% of the purchase price, payable in one go, before anything happened. Now any first payment activates the layby and locks the price. Making that true meant changing far more than a number — the proof-of-payment floor rejected $1 as noise, the activation gate still compared against the old deposit, and the auto-reply never said how to pay.
196 commits shipped after the last written release. Listed as the raw record rather than dressed up as versions that were never cut — this section disappears into the timeline above as soon as it is written up.