💡 Manager Vendor Recruitment & Outreach Pipeline

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Summary

A lightweight CRM pipeline for market managers to discover potential vendors from the USDA vendor registry and other public sources, send invitations through the app, and track outreach status (contacted → invited → applied → approved). Directly feeds the existing vendor join request workflow (FR13/FR10a), turning passive "wait for applications" into active roster-building.

Market Signal

Competitors (Marketspread, ManageMyMarket, Eventeny) all handle INBOUND vendor applications but none support OUTBOUND vendor recruitment. The USDA Local Food Directories list food hubs and on-farm markets that could be recruited as vendors. Farmish has 40K+ farms listed — many of which are potential market vendors but have no structured recruitment pathway. Building a diverse, reliable roster remains the hardest operational challenge for market managers, with no existing tool addressing it.

User Signal

The PRD targets 10 vendors per managed market in 90 days. FR10a already specifies manager-initiated vendor invitations as a planned feature. The existing vendor join flow (FR13) handles the inbound side, but there is no discovery or tracking for outbound recruitment. The manager persona needs to fill gaps in product diversity (e.g., "we need a bread vendor for Saturdays") and can't efficiently search or track outreach to prospective vendors.

Technical Opportunity

The USDA API (usdalocalfoodportal.com) provides structured vendor/producer data queryable by location and product type. The existing GraphQL schema supports vendor invitations (FR10a). Adding a pipeline view requires a new recruitment_outreach table with status tracking and a manager-facing list UI. The domain event bus can notify vendors of inbound invitations, reusing the existing notification infrastructure.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	med	Requires new data model, USDA integration, and pipeline UI. More complex than aggregation features but uses known patterns.
Impact	high	Directly solves the vendor roster quality and diversity problem. More vendors = more customer value = stronger flywheel.
Urgency	med	Most valuable during growth phase. Not MVP-blocking but enables faster market scaling.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: This is a CRM feature grafted onto a coordination app. It's scope creep that moves the product away from its core value proposition of market-day coordination.

Rebuttal: Building a diverse vendor roster IS core to market-day coordination — a market with 5 vendors provides less customer value than one with 25. The recruitment pipeline directly feeds the main product value by filling roster gaps. The implementation is lightweight (one table, one list view, one status tracker) and reuses the existing vendor invitation workflow (FR10a). It's a funnel that feeds the core product, not a separate product.

Suggested Next Step

Design the recruitment pipeline UI (list view with status filters or lightweight Kanban). Define the data model for outreach tracking (vendor_discovery_id, status, outreach_date, response). Integrate USDA vendor/producer API for discovery search by location and product category. Wire the invitation action to the existing FR10a vendor invitation workflow.