naby is connecting South Africa's communities through trusted, hyperlocal services, one neighbourhood at a time.
During the COVID years, I watched my neighbours struggle. People who had real skills (a plumber between jobs, a teenager willing to walk dogs, someone who could clean your house or fix your gate) had no way to reach the people right around them who needed exactly that.
WhatsApp groups, community notice boards, and word-of-mouth worked, but they didn't scale. People who needed help couldn't find the people who could provide it. And those who could provide it had no easy way to be found. Whether you're a qualified electrician, a gardener, or a high school kid wanting to earn some extra money, the problem is the same: there is no simple, trusted, local platform connecting you to the people nearby who need what you offer.
Households spend hours trying to find a trusted plumber, a reliable gardener, or even someone to walk the dog, across fragmented channels that were never built around local trust.
From qualified tradespeople to gardeners, house cleaners, tutors, and anyone else offering a skill in their community. Most have no easy, trusted way to reach the customers right around them.
Existing classifieds and directory platforms are national and anonymous. They list services, but they don't tell you that your neighbour already used this person and vouches for them. That context is everything.
South Africans spend hundreds of billions of rands every year on local services. Plumbers, electricians, gardeners, domestic workers, handymen, tutors, pet sitters, painters and more. Most of that spending is still arranged through word-of-mouth, a WhatsApp message, or a neighbour recommendation. naby is the platform that brings all of it together.
naby is a community-first services marketplace for anyone with a skill to offer and anyone who needs a service done. The electrician, the plumber, the gardener, the house cleaner, the dog walker, the tutor, the handyman next door. All in one place, all rated by people in your own community.
Browse and filter services by distance from your location. Find providers in your street, suburb, or broader area.
Ratings and reviews come from neighbours who actually used the service nearby. Real trust, not anonymous feedback.
Community members can add any local service provider without that person needing to sign up first. If you know a great electrician or a trustworthy dog walker, you can put them on the map for your neighbours straight away.
Providers can search by phone number and claim community-shared listings to take ownership and build their profile.
Users save and quickly access their trusted providers, building a personal shortlist for repeat services.
The app caches data and works offline, which is vital for users in areas with inconsistent connectivity.
Available on Google Play now, iOS coming soon, and accessible via a progressive web app at pwa.naby.services.
Location-based advertising capability is already built into the platform, ready for the monetisation phase.
Three months of dedicated, full-time development to take the app from its current state to a mature, polished product ready for a wider audience.
support@naby.servicesThree months of dedicated, full-time development to take the app from its current state to a mature, feature-complete product ready for a wider audience.
App performance and stability improvements. Bug fixes and UX polish across all existing features. iOS build prepared for App Store submission.
Provider subscription tiers built and live. Advertising and promoted listing functionality completed. In-app payments development underway.
In-app payments completed. Identity verification and trust badge system shipped. iOS app submitted to the App Store.
Phase 1 complete: A mature, polished app ready for market — with payments, subscriptions, trust verification, and advertising infrastructure all live and ready to generate revenue as users arrive in Phase 2.
naby is being developed and grown in deliberate phases. Each phase has a clear purpose, a defined outcome, and its own funding requirement. This is where we are and where we are going.
The sole focus of this raise is getting the app to a finished, well-polished state. This means dedicated full-time development time to complete the remaining features, stabilise performance, and deliver a product that is genuinely ready for a wide audience. No marketing, no team building. Just building the best version of the product possible.
With a polished product in hand, Phase 2 is about getting naby in front of people across the entire Western Cape. Campaigns will target both sides of the marketplace: households looking for trusted local services, and anyone with a skill to offer. That includes qualified tradespeople like plumbers and electricians, through to gardeners, house cleaners, tutors, and the high school student who wants to walk dogs on weekends. The goal is real community density before expanding into other provinces.
As naby grows, it needs a team and a proper operational foundation. This phase funds a dedicated person on the ground, responsible for onboarding providers across all service categories (from electricians and plumbers to pet sitters and domestic workers) and for building the kind of neighbourhood density that makes the platform genuinely useful in each new area. It also covers company incorporation, legal agreements, infrastructure scaling, and the overheads of running a real business.
Once the model is proven in the Western Cape, Phase 4 funds the expansion into Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, and the rest of South Africa. This is also the phase where naby evolves into a fully mature platform, with multiple active revenue streams, a growing team, and the foundation to look at Sub-Saharan Africa as the next frontier.
Investing now means getting in at Phase 1, the earliest and most impactful point in naby's journey. Each phase builds directly on the last.
naby wasn't built in a boardroom. It was built by someone who lives in the community it serves.
Founder and Developer, based in Paarl, Western Cape
Andri is a passionate technologist with deep roots in his local community in Paarl. He built the entire naby platform (design, development, backend, and deployment) single-handedly, while managing other commitments. The idea for naby came directly from watching neighbours struggle to find and offer services during the COVID-19 years. That lived experience shaped every decision: why community trust matters more than scale, why the supply side must be frictionless, and why hyperlocal is the right place to start. Andri is the kind of founder who ships, iterates, and stays close to users. naby reflects that.
Note on market estimates: The TAM, SAM, and SOM figures presented in the Market Opportunity section are management estimates constructed bottom-up from publicly available South African labour statistics, household survey data, and smartphone penetration rates. They are illustrative projections intended to frame the scale of the opportunity, and should not be taken as audited or guaranteed figures. Prospective investors are encouraged to conduct independent research.
This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a formal offer or solicitation of investment. All financial projections and market estimates are forward-looking and subject to change. naby is an early-stage product and investment involves risk. Prospective investors should conduct their own due diligence.
