Austin Headley, Founder & CEO
Austin Headley is a marketing and design professional with a decade-plus career in brand strategy, B2B/B2C marketing, and creative services. He founded ShopBroker in 2024 after experiencing the problems with local buying and selling firsthand: cash-only transactions with strangers, no payment protection, and no recourse when things went wrong.
Austin designed and built the platform from the ground up while working full-time, with no prior coding background, using AI coding tools (primarily Claude Code by Anthropic) end-to-end. He's a marketing operator shipping production fintech without ever having written software before, bringing a marketing-first perspective to a space typically approached from an engineering mindset.
The Thesis
Where most peer-to-peer marketplaces start with the transaction and bolt trust on afterward, ShopBroker starts with trust and builds the transaction around it: integrated PayPal Commerce Platform and Stripe Connect payments on an authorize-and-capture model (funds held by the provider, not in the seller's pocket, until the buyer confirms the item); Trexity same-day courier delivery across the Greater Toronto Area; and Price Genius, an AI pricing engine that pulls from internal transaction history, retail databases, and Claude AI market analysis to tell sellers what their item is actually worth.
ShopBroker exists because Canadian local commerce has been structurally underserved. Canada's multi-billion-dollar annual second-hand economy (an active market with millions of Canadian participants, per Kijiji's Second-Hand Economy Index) still runs on cash, parking-lot meet-ups, and unprotected transfers while every other retail channel has long since moved past them. Austin's thesis is that trust, not payment rails or delivery logistics on their own, is the missing piece.
Topics Austin Can Discuss
Building production software as a non-coder using AI coding tools: How a decade-plus marketing operator shipped a live fintech platform end-to-end without prior software development experience
AI as a force multiplier for solo founders: Practical uses of AI across the full product lifecycle, from code to copy
Fintech infrastructure for local commerce: Why peer-to-peer transactions need the same protections as e-commerce
Building a fintech platform from a marketing background: How a non-traditional technical path shapes product decisions
AI applications in everyday transactions: Practical uses of AI for pricing secondhand goods
Last-mile delivery for the secondhand economy: Building delivery infrastructure for goods that already exist in people's homes
Trust and safety in peer-to-peer marketplaces: How authorize-and-capture payments and reputation systems reduce fraud
Marketing strategy for early-stage startups: Balancing brand building with product development as a solo founder
Interview Availability
Austin is available for interviews, podcast appearances, and commentary on topics related to Canadian fintech, local commerce, and marketplace technology.
To arrange an interview, contact [email protected].
Related: Browse the full Press & Media collection: About ShopBroker, Key Facts & Milestones, Media FAQ, Brand Assets & Usage, and Press Contact.