Scoping a marketplace MVP down to one side

A two-sided marketplace is really two products built at once, and this founding team was building both sides simultaneously with a small team and a shrinking runway. Neither side was getting enough attention to actually work.

We helped them validate supply first, using a concierge setup that needed no code: manually matching early demand to hand-picked supply while the real product waited. It let them learn what suppliers actually needed before building for them.

The demand side, once it was tested on its own, turned out to want something meaningfully different from what the original plan assumed. Sequencing the two sides instead of building them in parallel is what made the MVP small enough to ship.