Vision

Somewhere close to where you are, a woman looked at what her garden gave this week — more than her family can eat, far less than a wholesaler would come for — and did nothing with it, because there is nothing she is allowed to do with it. A man who cooks better than most of the restaurants on his street will cook tonight for six people instead of sixty. Neither of them is short of skill, or goods, or people who would happily buy. What they are short of is a door.

Cyca began with that observation and refused to let go of it. Not a gap in the market — a gap where the market itself should be.

Most people are not allowed to sell

Try to open the smallest possible business almost anywhere and count the walls. A licence: in the United States the share of workers needing government permission to practise their trade has climbed from around one in twenty in the 1950s to roughly one in five today, and the trades in question are cooking, hairdressing, floristry — not surgery. Capital: a bank spends nearly as much underwriting a five-thousand-dollar loan as a five-hundred-thousand-dollar one, so the small loan is unprofitable by construction, and the Federal Reserve’s own small-business survey shows only a minority of applicants getting everything they asked for — with the youngest and smallest firms doing worst. Premises: a shop means a commercial lease, three to ten years, usually personally guaranteed, signed before a single customer exists.

Each wall has a sensible story behind it. Stacked together they stop being sensible and become an entrance exam, and the subject of the exam is not whether you are any good.

A wall does not filter for quality. It filters for capital. Everyone it turns away as a seller comes back as a customer.

That is the quiet arithmetic of it. Someone kept out of the market as a producer is not lost to the economy — they are delivered into it as demand, for the industrial supply chains that did get over the wall. The farmer who cannot sell rice buys packaged rice. The cook who cannot sell food buys manufactured food.

Two billion people, and nowhere to stand

In wealthy countries the wall is bureaucratic. Across most of the world it is simply total — there is no formal channel to be let into at all. The International Labour Organization puts around six in ten of the world’s workers outside formal arrangements: roughly two billion people who farm, fish, sew, cook, build and repair entirely beyond the reach of the institutions that would let them sell past their own street. The World Bank counts about 1.4 billion adults with no bank account of any kind. The IFC puts the credit that small enterprises in developing economies need and cannot get at around $5.2 trillion a year.

• 2.0bnpeople working informally — about 58% of all employment, and 86% across Africa
• 1.4bnadults with no bank account, no credit history, and no formal path to a lease or a loan
• $5.2tna year in credit that small enterprises in developing economies need and never receive

Set that beside one more number. Something like 4.6 billion people now use mobile internet, and the share living outside mobile broadband coverage has fallen to a few percent. The distribution problem — the genuinely hard one, the one that took thirty years and hundreds of billions of dollars — is solved.

A farmer in Bogura can watch a livestream from São Paulo on a ninety-dollar phone. He still cannot sell his own surplus rice to a town twenty minutes away.

Everything was built to carry goods and advertising to those two billion people. Almost nothing was built to carry anything back from them. Where a substitute appears, it is adopted instantly and awkwardly: hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi entrepreneurs, most of them women, run entire businesses out of Facebook pages and comment threads. That is not proof that a social feed makes a good marketplace. It is proof of how badly one is needed.

There is precedent for what happens when the missing piece finally arrives. When mobile money reached Kenya, researchers writing in Science estimated it lifted around 194,000 households — some two percent of the population — out of poverty, with the largest gains going to households headed by women. The institution that was missing then was payments. The institution still missing now is the market itself.

The long chain eats the value

Ask where the money goes on the way from a field to a kitchen and the answer is not comfortable. The US Department of Agriculture tracks it precisely: of every retail food dollar, roughly fifteen cents reaches the farm. The rest is collection, processing, packaging, transport, retail margin and advertising. Work by the Reserve Bank of India on food prices finds growers there receiving on the order of a third of what the shopper pays for vegetables.

The long chain does not only take money. It decides what gets grown. Produce that has to survive collection, storage, a lorry and a shelf is bred for durability rather than for taste, picked before it is ready, and chilled until it arrives looking like food. The variety that tastes best but bruises does not enter the chain at all. Neither does the small grower, the household with ten kilos of surplus, or the fisherman with one good morning.

The short chain, and what it makes possible

Cyca removes the middle entirely. Someone with something to sell photographs it and it is on sale — or they go live and sell it from their own hands, to the faces watching, with the produce held up to the camera and questions answered as they come. What does not sell on air stays on a storefront that keeps selling while they sleep. Delivery is done by people from the same streets, on foot or on whatever they ride, who set their own fee and switch themselves on and off duty.

There is no listing fee and no commission on a sale. Money moves directly between the two people in the trade — cash at the door, or a direct transfer — and nothing is taken out of the middle of it. For comparison: independent analysis of Amazon’s marketplace puts total seller fees at close to half of a typical third-party seller’s revenue, and food-delivery platforms have commonly charged restaurants fifteen to thirty percent.

What follows from a short chain is not one benefit but a loop, and the loop is the whole point.

Better food, and a reason to grow it

When a grower can reach buyers directly, the produce that reaches the table is the produce that was actually best — picked ripe because it only has to travel across a neighbourhood, organic because it came out of a garden rather than a certification budget, and fresh in the ordinary sense of the word rather than the industrial one. The buyer pays less for it than the shop charged, because nobody in between is being paid any more.

And because that produce now has somewhere to go, more of it gets grown. A household that could never sell a surplus has a reason to plant more than it eats. A fisherman has a reason to bring in the extra catch. Supply of local, seasonal, small-batch food rises — and as it rises and people taste the difference, demand moves toward it. Money that used to leave the area for an industrial supply chain starts circling inside it instead.

The grower earns more and the buyer pays less at the same time. That is not a trick. It is simply what happens when nobody is standing in between taking a share for standing there.

Quality polices itself in a short chain, too, and more harshly than any inspection. A seller here is a person with a name, a face, a location and a history of delivered orders, selling to people who live nearby and will simply stop coming. Reputation is the oldest form of consumer protection there is, and the only one that scales down to a single basket of vegetables.

A market is people talking

This is the half that people who build marketplaces usually forget. Long before it was a system of prices, a market was a conversation: you asked whether the mangoes were sweet, the seller told you which crate came in this morning, and you both remembered the exchange next week. Trade between people who know each other is not a colder version of trade between strangers. It is the original version, and it is better.

So Cyca is a messenger first. Conversations are end-to-end encrypted, and there is no advertising in the product and no advertising business behind it — because a market where the operator reads the mail between buyers and sellers and auctions their attention has simply moved the toll booth somewhere less visible.

And every call button carries live presence. A seller who is online right now shows green: you can call and hear their voice. A shop becomes a person you can ring rather than a form you submit. Seeing a neighbour’s light on is a small thing that changes the character of everything around it — you buy differently from someone you can talk to, you sell more carefully to someone who will see you tomorrow, and a community that trades with itself ends up knowing itself better than one that only shops.

Who this is for

The money stays where it was made

A chain store is, in the most literal sense, a pipe. It is engineered to move a neighbourhood’s money to a balance sheet somewhere else, and no pipe has ever pumped backwards. A town full of them is a town being drained on a schedule, legally, efficiently, and with a loyalty card.

The alternative is not charity or nostalgia. It is arithmetic. When the seller, the buyer and the courier all live within a few streets of each other and nothing is extracted in between, the same money goes around again instead of leaving — and a market that keeps its own earnings compounds in a way that an extracted one never can. That is what the phrase at the end of this document actually means. It is a description of where the money sits, not a sentiment about community.

None of this requires anyone to be idealistic. The grower is better off. The buyer is better off. The courier is better off. The only party worse off is the one that was being paid to stand in the middle.

What we are holding ourselves to

A statement of intent is worth very little on its own, so these are the things that would tell us it is working, or that it is not. How long it takes an ordinary person to go from installing the app to their first sale. How much of what a buyer pays ends up with the seller. How often the buyer, the seller and the courier are all from the same place. How much of the trade belongs to ordinary sellers rather than a handful of professional ones. And the number that decides the argument: how many people selling here had no other way to sell anything at all.

To the woman with the garden, the man with the kitchen, the family with the boat and the kid with the bicycle: the square is open again. Two billion people were never short of ability, or goods, or customers. They were short of a door.

Sources & notes

1. International Labour Organization, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, 3rd ed. (2018), and later ILO informality estimates.
2. World Bank, The Global Findex Database 2021 (2022), and the 2025 update.
3. International Finance Corporation, MSME Finance Gap (2017); SME Finance Forum.
4. M. Kleiner and A. Krueger, Journal of Labor Economics 31(2), 2013; US Bureau of Labor Statistics certification and licensing data.
5. Council of Economic Advisers, US Treasury and US Department of Labor, Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers (2015); Institute for Justice, License to Work, 3rd ed. (2022).
6. Federal Reserve Banks, Small Business Credit Survey: Report on Employer Firms (annual).
7. USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series; Reserve Bank of India studies on food price dynamics.
8. Marketplace Pulse analyses of Amazon third-party seller fees (2023); reported food-delivery commission structures and US municipal commission-cap disclosures (2020–2022).
9. Civic Economics, The Andersonville Study of Retail Economics (2004) and later local-retention studies. These are commissioned, sector-specific and small-sample: the direction is consistent, the magnitude varies.
10. GSMA, The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity and State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money (2024).
11. T. Suri and W. Jack, “The long-run poverty and gender impacts of mobile money”, Science 354(6317), 2016.
12. e-CAB and LightCastle Partners estimates of Bangladesh’s F-commerce sector.
13. Background: K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944); M. Granovetter on embeddedness, AJS 91(3), 1985; E. Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990); H. de Soto, The Mystery of Capital (2000); P. Resnick and R. Zeckhauser on reputation systems (2002).
14. Note: there is no authoritative current cross-country series on business entry — the World Bank discontinued Doing Business in 2021 and its replacement covers 50 economies in its first edition (2024).

A Cyca memorandum, September 2026. Cyca is on the App Store and Google Play.