The fastest way to launch a marketplace is to open everywhere and let it fill in. It is also the fastest way to make sure nobody ever comes back.
An empty marketplace teaches people to leave
Someone opens the app on a free afternoon looking for something within a couple of miles in the next few hours. If the honest answer is “nothing near you today”, they have learned something about us that one good week of supply will not unteach.
You get one first impression per person. Spending it on an empty screen is the most expensive thing a marketplace can do.
Both sides have to be local
Distance is not a detail here, it is the product. A slot in forty minutes is only useful if you can physically get there. A national launch with thin coverage is really a thousand tiny marketplaces, almost all of them empty.
So we are opening by area, and not opening one until there is enough real availability in it that a client checking on a normal Tuesday afternoon finds something worth booking.
What that means for providers
Founding providers in an area go live first, with locked-in founder terms, and they see the demand before anyone else in their category is on the platform.
It also means we may not open your area for a while, and we would rather say so than have you list openings into a market with nobody in it.
What that means if you want to book
Join the waitlist with your zip code and you will hear from us when there is genuinely something to book near you. Not at launch, not when we are close. When it works.
Slower to start, and considerably more likely to be worth opening twice.