Buddie-X

Buddie-X is a two-sided marketplace for 1:1 mentorship: career, technology, business, and personal growth. People making a next move were stuck between generic courses and whoever they already knew. Mentors had expertise but no clean way to show up, take bookings, and get paid.

The product had to carry both sides of that flow: a short mentee path from a goal to a confirmed session, and a working layer mentors could run themselves. Community questions sit next to booking, so you can ask before you pay.

The public app is what people actually open: a homepage that sells the product, a three-step matcher, category search, marketplace cards with ratings, next availability, and starting price, filtered Pro and full catalogs, profile pages with time blocks, and per-session checkout. Mentors and mentees each get a dashboard for bookings, messages, sessions, and wallets. Community Q&A, mentorship circles, and the blog ship alongside the catalog.

The frontend is React and TypeScript on Vite, with Tailwind and HeroUI for the UI, TanStack Query and Redux for server and session state, Firebase for push notifications, and Pusher for live chat. The API is Laravel. Stripe handles payments and refunds; Zoom is the 1:1 session itself.

Mentors sit in different time zones from the people booking them, so next availability on a card has to match the slot the mentor actually holds. A paid session, a cancel inside the 24-hour refund window, and a mentor withdrawal all have to land on the same ledger.

The mentee path has to stay short: share a goal, get matched, book. The mentor dashboard has to stay detailed enough for people who live in it: offerings, availability, messages, reviews, wallet. Those are two products sharing one booking system.

Live at buddie-x.com and in daily use, with mentee and mentor dashboards, community, and the blog shipping alongside the marketplace as more mentors come onto the platform.