Who It Is For — The Four Roles

Fyndow serves four roles. Each has a distinct goal, a distinct set of jobs-to-be-done, and — by design — a distinct experience of the product. Role clarity is a core principle: each role sees only its world, and never the tooling that belongs to another. (See Vision, Principles & Non-Goals.)

A handful of capabilities deliberately cut across the roles. Anyone can create and join a community, and anyone signed in can post an Event to the world. Those shared capabilities are noted where they appear below, because they are part of what makes Fyndow feel like one product rather than four.

Customer (Member)

Who: Anyone looking to find, hire, or buy from a local service provider or product seller.

Goal: Get a trusted provider to do a job or sell a product — with confidence and protection — without gambling on strangers.

Jobs-to-be-done:

• Search services and products by type, location, availability, and verified credentials.
• Filter search by community membership — find providers who share their communities.
• Browse a provider's business page: services, products, portfolio, reviews, availability, and trust badges.
• Book appointments, place orders, and pay through the platform.
• View all bookings, orders, and invoices in one transactions list.
• Review completed transactions — both sides rate each other, tied to real payments.
• Join and participate in communities; create communities (any user can).
• Post an Event about something happening locally — a cleanup day, a pop-up, a fundraiser — as themselves, with no business required. See Happenings.
• React to and comment on Happenings they can see.
• Message providers about their bookings and orders.
• File a dispute on a booking or order and track its status.
• Manage profile and settings (name, avatar, city, notification preferences, theme, account deletion).

What a customer must never see: Back Office, AI Assistant, business-management tools, invoicing, quoting, inventory, expenses. None of that is their world.

:::tip Posting isn't a provider privilege Telling people about an Event is open to everyone. What Fyndow charges for is reach, not the act of posting — so a member can announce a neighbourhood market exactly the way a business can, and the post simply carries the member's own name as its byline. Full details are in Happenings. :::

Provider

Who: Any business that provides services or sells products — from a solo plumber to a 100-person contractor, from a massage therapist to a bakery. A single provider account can run multiple businesses, each with its own page, services, products, clients, and financials.

Goal: Win more of the right work and run the business with as little friction as possible — ideally by talking, not clicking.

Jobs-to-be-done:

• Talk to the AI assistant to run the business in natural language: "Invoice the Johnson kitchen job," "What's my schedule tomorrow?," "Quote the Morrison wedding," "Add sports massage to my service list." The assistant orchestrates the entire business toolkit, with confirmation before money moves or anything irreversible happens.
• Use the Back Office (visual fallback) for the same capabilities as pages and forms: Calendar, Services, Products, Inventory, Clients, Invoices, Quotes, Payments, Reports, Portfolio, Expenses, Follow-ups, Disputes, Credentials, Settings.
• Manage services, products, availability, bookings (accept/decline), quotes, invoices, clients, expenses, inventory, portfolio, follow-ups, and disputes.
• Promote the business with Happenings — post a Promotion (a sale or special), an Ad (broad brand awareness), or an Event, attached to a business they own and carrying that business's name and logo. See Happenings.
• Connect third-party integrations they already use: payments, calendar sync, and accounting export. See Integrations.
• Submit credentials for verification and build a layered trust profile — a Verified business badge, verified-credential (licensed) badges, and Community Endorsed standing from peers. See Trust & Reputation.
• Participate in communities — answering questions and sharing work naturally boosts search visibility (a trust signal, not a requirement).
• Receive an AI-curated digest (daily/weekly/on-demand): schedule, revenue, follow-ups, community activity, credential renewals.
• See a setup checklist when a business is new (add service, set availability, connect payments, complete profile).

What a provider must never see: Organization-specific onboarding, org-type selection, institutional community-management framing.

:::tip The supply-side thesis The toolkit has standalone value: it makes a provider's operational life better whether or not a given job is paid through Fyndow. That standalone value is what earns Fyndow a place in the provider's workflow. The full set of capabilities — scheduling, quoting, invoicing, payments, CRM, and more — is laid out in The Business Toolkit. :::

Organization

Who: Schools, HOAs, nonprofits, churches, chambers of commerce, government agencies, professional associations. They are NOT businesses that sell services or products.

Goal: Reach and engage their members through structured communities — and, by surfacing the trusted providers among those members, make the marketplace more trustworthy for everyone in their orbit.

Jobs-to-be-done:

• Create and manage communities with controlled (often gated) membership.
• Organize communities with channels (announcements, general discussion, etc.) — like Discord/Slack.
• Publish targeted announcements, programs, and campaigns to opted-in members.
• Post Happenings to their communities — free, member-only, live immediately — so members hear about gatherings and programs in the same place they already follow.
• Moderate content and manage member roles (admin, moderator, verified_pro, member).
• View community health: member counts, post activity, engagement analytics.
• Communicate with members via messages.

What an organization must never see: Back Office, Services, Products, Invoices, Bookings, Payments, Clients, Inventory, Expenses, Quotes, Calendar, Portfolio, Follow-ups, AI Assistant, Transactions. Their sidebar is: Home, Dashboard, Communities, Messages, Notifications, Profile, Settings.

After onboarding, organizations are directed to "Create Your First Community" — because that is the only reason they are here.

Platform Administrator

Who: Fyndow's internal team, managing the health of the marketplace.

Goal: Keep the marketplace trustworthy and safe — verified credentials, fair dispute outcomes, clean communities, healthy accounts, and a public feed worth opening.

Jobs-to-be-done:

• Review and verify or reject credentials submitted by providers (with notes).
• Review public Happenings before they go live — a quality gate that keeps the public feed free of spam, scams, and content that doesn't belong. Community Happenings skip this step; they are self-moderated and go live immediately. See Happenings.
• Resolve disputes between customers and providers — read both sides' statements, issue a resolution (refund or dismiss).
• Moderate communities and content.
• Monitor marketplace-health analytics.
• Manage user accounts: bans (sessions invalidated), role changes (customer/provider/organization), deletions.

Admins work primarily through the Admin Dashboard (a separate interface), connected to the same backend.

A note on the Dashboard vs. the Back Office

These two are easy to confuse, so the distinction matters:

Surface	Belongs to	Purpose
Back Office	Providers only	Run the business: the full toolkit as pages/forms.
Dashboard	Anyone who has created a community — regardless of role	Manage communities: stats, member counts, engagement charts, moderation.

A customer who started a community sees a Dashboard. A provider running three communities sees a Dashboard and a Back Office. An organization sees a Dashboard but never a Back Office. Community creation is a platform capability available to any user, not a role-specific feature — and so, in the same spirit, is posting an Event.

How the roles fit together

The roles form a self-reinforcing system. Organizations and members create the communities; communities make trusted providers discoverable; customers transact with those providers; both sides build reputation through real paid work; admins keep the whole thing honest. Happenings ride on top of all of it, giving everyone — member and business alike — a way to surface what's happening right now. That circulation is the flywheel, walked end-to-end in The Product in One Tour.