HorseLift
StartupEU-wide marketplace for professional horse transport, an Uber-style platform connecting riders, breeders and buyers with verified haulers. Users enter origin, destination and horse details to get a price estimate in seconds, book a vetted transporter, pay through Stripe escrow that releases on delivery confirmation, and follow the shipment through a live status tracker. It also auto-generates the required TRACES transport papers and supports shared rides.
horselift.comProblem
Booking a horse transport across Europe is opaque and manual: riders hunt for trustworthy haulers by phone, get no clear price, have no proof the transporter is verified, and must deal with EU TRACES paperwork themselves while having no visibility into where their horse is during the trip.
Solution
A two-sided platform that gives an instant price estimate from origin, destination and horse data, routes the request to verified haulers, secures payment in a Stripe Connect escrow that only releases after the horse is unloaded, auto-generates the TRACES documents as PDFs, and shows a step-by-step status tracker from booked to delivered. Haulers get their own onboarding, dashboard and payouts.
Tech Stack
Infrastructure
Self-hosted on hetznerprod under /opt/startups/horselift via Docker (standalone Next.js build, docker-compose). Self-hosted Supabase (supabase.stickymicky.com) with a dedicated horselift Postgres schema and PostGIS for geo-queries. Stripe Connect for hauler payouts and escrow, Resend for transactional and waitlist email. Intended production domain horselift.stickymicky.com.
Outlook
Solve the marketplace cold-start by building hauler supply first, then add an automated matching algorithm and shared-ride pooling on top of the current manual request flow, expand the insurance add-on and Pro membership tiers, and grow organic acquisition through the city and ratgeber SEO pages.