BlissBuy
A prototype connecting Southeast Asia's small shops, shoppers and lenders, with AI-assisted onboarding to make serving small merchants more practical.
Why
In late 2023, a year after ChatGPT’s launch, I was exploring where AI could change the economics of a service. Together with Artem Rafaielian, I focused on small merchants in Southeast Asia: shops that lenders could find too expensive to onboard, even when their customers needed financing for a purchase.
The problem connected three groups. A shop wanted to sell, a customer wanted an affordable way to pay, and a lender needed enough confidence in both to offer credit. Expensive verification and fragmented integrations made that connection difficult.
BlissBuy was our exploration of whether AI-assisted onboarding and a shared platform could lower that barrier. The ambition was to bring financing to the point of purchase, making small shops easier for lenders to serve and giving shoppers more options to compare.
How
The prototype brings buyers, merchants and lenders into one flow, with blissbuy for customers and blisssell for merchants:
- Bring the shop online: merchants create and manage a digital presence from a smartphone.
- Connect the purchase to financing: shoppers discover stores and compare proposed product-loan offers from multiple lenders.
- Give lenders one integration: a unified API connects them to participating merchants.
- Assist verification with AI: document reading and identity-checking components explore how to reduce the manual work of onboarding.
We built a conceptual prototype, then discontinued development. In 2025, I open-sourced it as a reference for the architecture and the idea. The result is a concrete starting point for exploring where merchant onboarding, identity checks and loan offers fit together.