9 Years in the Marketplace Trenches

The Story

Why I Only Work on Marketplaces

When I built my first marketplace in 2017 — a P2P rental platform — I quickly discovered that none of the standard product frameworks applied. The cold-start problem, the trust architecture, the supply-demand balancing act — these were problems that required a fundamentally different way of thinking.

I got obsessed. I read everything. I led product and engineering teams at scale. I made expensive mistakes, figured out what actually worked, and started advising other founders on the lessons I had learned the hard way.

In 2021, I founded Marketplace Studio to formalise that work — helping non-technical founders design, validate, and build marketplaces with greater clarity and confidence. Three years later I began embedding directly with early-stage teams as a fractional CPO, because founders needed more than strategy documents — they needed someone in the room.

Nine years later, the focus has never shifted. Every client, every project, every hour of advisory work has been marketplace-specific. That depth is the only reason I can offer what most generalist product leaders cannot: genuine pattern recognition across 30+ marketplace builds in dozens of categories.