There's an old folk tale called Stone Soup. A traveller arrives in a village with nothing but a pot and a stone. He sets the pot over a fire, fills it with water, and drops in the stone. Villagers gather, curious. "Stone soup," he says. "Delicious, though it's even better with a few carrots." One villager fetches carrots. "Better still with some potatoes." Another brings potatoes. By the end, the whole village is sharing a genuine meal — made from nothing but the things they already had, and a nudge to share them.
I've thought about that story a lot while building SwapU.
How I ended up here
I've had a strange career. I trained as a chef — serious kitchen work, the kind where you arrive at 6am and leave after midnight. Then I spent several years in production coordination for Cirque du Soleil touring shows, which is exactly as logistically intense as it sounds: hundred-person crews, dozens of trucks, venues changing every three weeks. After that, I taught secondary school for close to a decade.
The thread connecting those three things is coordination under constraint. Kitchens, touring productions, and classrooms all run on scarce resources, time pressure, and the need to get people who've never met to trust each other quickly. You learn a lot about what makes people collaborate — and what makes them hold back.
The thing that bothered me about car ownership
In 2018 I was living in Brisbane and trying to change cars. I had a small city hatchback that had served its purpose; I wanted something with more ground clearance for weekend trips. The standard path — sell mine, buy theirs — was going to cost me thousands in lost margin, fees, and double stamp duty, even if I found the right car immediately.
I started thinking about it differently. Somewhere in Brisbane there was almost certainly someone doing the exact opposite trade: a four-wheel drive that had been overkill since the kids started school, wanting a practical city car. We each had what the other needed. The only thing missing was a way to find each other, agree a fair price, and complete the paperwork without either of us getting burned.
That's the stone soup problem. Both villagers had ingredients. Nobody had introduced them yet.
Why trust is the hard part
Peer-to-peer selling platforms like Facebook Marketplace exist. People swap things on them every day. But for a $25,000 asset — something you drive, that has legal ownership attached to it, that might have hidden mechanical issues or finance still owing — the informal handshake that works for a $50 bookcase doesn't cut it.
I spoke with Impact Boom and several social enterprise researchers in 2019 and 2020, trying to understand what made some peer-to-peer platforms work and others collapse. The consensus was consistent: platforms fail not when there aren't enough users, but when there isn't enough trust infrastructure. Buyers and sellers can find each other; what they can't do is verify, commit, and be protected when something goes wrong.
That's what SwapU is: trust infrastructure, not just a matching algorithm.
The virtual Songlines idea
One of the concepts I came back to repeatedly in early planning was what I called "virtual Songlines" — the idea that every completed swap leaves behind a traceable path of good faith. The vehicle was inspected. The PPSR was clear. The agreement was signed. The handover was confirmed. Those verified steps build a network of trust that makes the next swap easier for everyone.
It's still the goal. The chain algorithm — matching not just direct swaps but multi-party chains where A's car goes to B, B's car goes to C, and C's car comes back to A — was the original vision. We're still working toward it. The infrastructure has to be solid first.
What the recipe looks like now
In 2026, a SwapU swap looks like this: two owners, a shared pool of information, PPSR checks on both cars, a co-signed Swap Agreement, Stripe escrow for any cash adjustment, and a structured handover that triggers automatic release. The whole thing takes five to seven days. Neither owner needs a dealer, an agent, or a solicitor.
The recipe, if you want to write it out:
- Start with two owners who each want what the other has
- Add transparent information (kilometres, rego, service history, PPSR)
- Mix in a plain-English agreement that protects both sides
- Hold any cash in escrow so neither party can be burned
- Confirm the handover before anything releases
The stone is the technology. The soup comes from the owners bringing what they already have.
Books that shaped the thinking
A few things I read that I keep returning to: Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics on gift economies and the psychology of exchange. Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics on designing systems within planetary limits. Yvon Chouinard's Let My People Go Surfing on building a company around a genuine constraint. None of them are about cars. All of them shaped how I think about what SwapU is trying to be.
Where we're going
SwapU launched in Brisbane in 2020. In 2026 we're expanding across South-East Queensland. The matching algorithm is live; the escrow is live; the PPSR integration is live. The multi-party chain matching is the next piece.
If you've been waiting to change cars because the transaction costs felt absurd — they are absurd. That's why we exist.