Marketplace consulting from people who built their own.
Most marketplace advice is theoretical, technical, or written after the fact. We are marketplace consultants who have launched, operated, and scaled our own two-sided platforms, and who build them for founders every week. That experience is what you hire.
The decisions we help you get right.
A marketplace consultant exists to compress your learning curve. These are the questions founders bring us most often, and the ones that decide whether a platform reaches liquidity or stalls.
Strategy and positioning
Which niche to start in, which side to build first, and what wedge gets you to your first hundred transactions. Strategy set before code is the cheapest strategy you will ever buy.
Validation before building
Testing whether both sides actually want the exchange, with founder-led sales and manual matching, before you spend on a platform. Weeks of validation save months of building the wrong thing.
Business model and take rate
What to charge, which side pays, and how the unit economics hold up at scale. The take rate is a strategy decision, and we have written extensively on how to make it.
Platform and build decisions
Sharetribe, another no-code marketplace builder, or custom development. As a Sharetribe certified partner that also ships custom builds, we recommend the platform that fits your stage, not our margins.
Supply, demand, and liquidity
How to seed supply by hand, when to turn on demand spend, and which liquidity metrics to watch. This is the work that decides the cold start, and it is where we have the most scar tissue.
Growth and retention
Getting a live marketplace unstuck: diagnosing whether the problem is traction, matching, or retention, and building the loops that produce the second transaction.
Four moments where consulting pays for itself.
Before you build
You have the idea and the market knowledge, and you want the strategy validated before committing to a platform. This is our Pre-Development sprint, and it is the highest-leverage engagement we offer.
Pre-DevelopmentWhen you are choosing a platform
You are weighing Sharetribe, another no-code tool, or a custom build, and every vendor you talk to recommends whatever they happen to sell. We give you the honest comparison.
Build and LaunchWhen your marketplace is stuck
The platform is live but liquidity is not happening: searches fail, suppliers churn, buyers do not return. We diagnose which loop is broken and work alongside you until it moves.
Grow Your MarketplaceWhen you need ongoing expertise
You do not need a full-time product team, but you need marketplace judgment on tap: roadmap calls, feature decisions, and build capacity scoped to a monthly rhythm.
Fractional TeamConsultants who still build.
We founded and operated our own marketplaces, including P2P rental platforms, before we advised anyone on theirs. Then we spent years shipping marketplaces for more than thirty clients across rentals, services, B2B, and talent.
That combination matters. A marketplace strategy consultant who has never operated a marketplace gives you frameworks. A development agency without strategy experience builds whatever you ask for, including the mistakes. We sit in the middle on purpose: the strategy is grounded in operating experience, and the advice is tested against real builds every week.
If you are earlier in the journey, start with our writing. The marketplace glossary covers the vocabulary, the blog covers supply strategy and take rates in depth, and The Marketplace Book is the long-form version of how we think.
Marketplace consulting, answered plainly.
What does a marketplace consultant actually do?
A marketplace consultant helps you make the decisions that determine whether your platform works: which side to build first, how to reach liquidity, what to charge, what to build now versus later, and which platform to build on. Good consulting replaces guesswork with decisions grounded in what has already worked, and failed, on other marketplaces.
How is marketplace consulting different from general startup advice?
Marketplaces fail in ways other startups do not. The chicken-and-egg problem, supply-side churn, disintermediation, and liquidity thresholds are specific to two-sided platforms. General startup advice rarely covers them, and applying single-sided SaaS playbooks to a marketplace is one of the most common ways founders waste their first year.
When should I hire a marketplace consultant?
The highest-leverage moment is before you build, when strategy changes are still cheap. The second-best moments are when a live marketplace is stuck, when you are choosing between platforms like Sharetribe and a custom build, or when you are preparing to raise and need your model and metrics to hold up to scrutiny.
What does an engagement with Marketplace Studio look like?
Every engagement starts with a free thirty-minute discovery call. From there, most consulting work runs through our Pre-Development sprint for idea-stage founders, our Grow program for live marketplaces, or a fractional team arrangement for ongoing support. We scope the engagement to the decision you need to make, not to a standard package.
Do you only consult, or do you build as well?
Both, and that is the point. Our consulting is informed by the builds we deliver, and our builds are informed by the strategy work. If the right answer for you is a no-code platform, a Sharetribe build, or not building yet, we will say so, because we are not selling development hours you do not need.