Founded on real marketplace experience.
Most studios learn from their clients. We learned by doing it ourselves first, building and running real marketplace platforms. That's the experience we bring to every project.
From operating marketplaces to helping others build them.
It started in 2014 with a peer-to-peer rental marketplace built in Ottawa, as non-technical founders doing what most of our clients are doing now, making high-stakes decisions without a technical background to lean on. That platform grew into a multi-million dollar business. Then a travel-rentals platform. Both taught us the same lesson: marketplaces fail in patterns, and most founders learn those patterns the expensive way.
By 2019, other founders were finding us and asking us to consult on their own platforms. By 2021, we were a studio. We never planned to be one. We just kept getting asked the same questions by founders who were exactly where we had been, and decided we were the right people to answer them. Since then, we have worked with marketplace founders across every model and industry, and what started as hard-won personal experience has grown into something much larger, a constantly expanding understanding of what makes marketplaces succeed.
We are still a family business. Small, deliberate, and built around people who have actually done this work. We do not try to be everything to everyone, we work with founders who are serious about building marketplaces the right way, and we use AI to deliver more than our size would suggest.
A team built for marketplace founders.
Co-Founder · Product Officer
Darren
Darren has spent over a decade building, running, and advising on marketplace platforms, starting as a non-technical founder navigating decisions he had no playbook for. Today he leads every engagement at the product and strategy level. He is the person on the call when the hard questions come up, the ones about what to build, what to cut, and whether the idea will actually work.
Product Manager
Katrina
Katrina runs the full project lifecycle on every engagement. She is the person who challenges assumptions and makes sure every use case is accounted for before it becomes an expensive oversight. Her background running growth inside two-sided marketplace platforms means she understands both sides of your marketplace deeply, not just the one that's easiest to build for.
Senior Product Designer
Paige
Paige has spent her career designing marketplace experiences, not just interfaces. These are the flows that determine whether a stranger trusts your platform enough to transact. She knows which design decisions slow down first transactions and which ones accelerate them, and she designs from that knowledge, not from what looks good in a portfolio.
Senior Product Manager
Aaron
Aaron is the person who thinks about what goes wrong before it does. With deep expertise in marketplace trust, safety, and dispute resolution, he has spent his career understanding how users behave when things don't go to plan, and designing for it before it becomes a problem. He knows what your users will complain about before they do, and builds that thinking into every product decision.
Team Member
Steve
Steve still actively runs a peer-to-peer marketplace of his own. He trials new technology on his own platform first, so the lessons he shares are current and tested, not theoretical. He also has deep experience in marketplace growth and raising investment, making him the person founders turn to when they are thinking beyond the build.
The principles behind every project.
Education through doing.
Founders learn marketplaces by running one. Our job is to compress the painful parts of that learning into the work, not to put you in a course. You leave engagements knowing your platform end-to-end.
Ownership from day one.
Your code, design files, roadmap, and customer relationships are yours from day one. We make sure that from the very first day, you could hand this project to anyone and they'd know exactly where everything is.
Real judgment never gets automated
AI handles the repetitive work, the parts that don't require experience or judgment. The decisions that shape your marketplace, the ones that determine whether it succeeds, are always made by real people with real experience.
What AI actually changed, and what it didn't.
Most founders ask us about AI before they ask anything else. Here is what we tell them.
Why we made the change
Two years ago, a typical build ran 16 to 20 weeks. Half of that was repetitive work, the kind that takes time but doesn't require judgment. The kind that slows everything down without improving the product. AI changed that. Not because it makes decisions, but because it handles the work that doesn't require them. The people on your project now spend their time on the things that actually determine whether your marketplace succeeds.
What stayed the same
Every line of code that ships gets reviewed by a real person whose name is on your account. Every architectural decision is made by someone with marketplace experience. We did not change who decides. We changed how fast the decision gets built.
What we learned
AI is excellent at repetitive work and genuinely bad at judgment. It is fast and confidently wrong when left unsupervised. Used without careful human review it produces exactly the kind of work you have heard cautionary tales about.
Used with strict review and a clear list of things it is never allowed to touch, it cuts our build time roughly in half without changing the quality of what ships.
What we will tell you on the call
Exactly which parts of your build will use AI and which will not. We do not hide it. We do not market it as magic. The judgment is not negotiable. The speed is what is new.