Ship It Live — $1,999 flat
Design + build + deploy · kickoff in 24h · limited slots
Ship It Live · marketplace sprint
Your two-sided marketplace, taking real transactions in 30 days.
Both sides of the market, a working checkout, and real money moving — in a month. Not a landing page with a waitlist, and not a three-month discovery phase.
Quick answer
A two-sided marketplace can be designed, built and taking real transactions in 30 days for a fixed $2,500, provided v1 covers one category and one city. That window includes both sides of the marketplace, listings, search, checkout through Stripe, and launch. Escrow and multi-country payouts are a separate project.
The plan
Day one to day 30, written down.
You get this schedule before you commit, not after. If a phase slips, that is mine to absorb — the price and the date were agreed before anything started.
- 1
Days 1–3
Scope lock
The single category and single city v1 launches in, and which side we optimise for first. Marketplaces fail on the cold-start problem, so this conversation is about supply before it is about software.
- 2
Days 4–12
Design
Both sides, end to end: listing creation, browse, search, the booking or purchase flow, and the messages between the two. Empty states matter more here than anywhere — a marketplace on day one is mostly empty.
- 3
Days 13–24
Build
Listings, search, accounts and Stripe wired up properly, including the payout split. A staging URL goes up early so you can list real supply while I am still building.
- 4
Days 25–28
Transact and fix
Real end-to-end transactions with real cards in test mode, then live. This is where marketplace bugs surface, so the week is deliberately reserved for it.
- 5
Days 29–30
Launch
Payments switched live, admin handed over, and the first real listings published on your domain.
What $2,500 gets you
Everything needed to launch — nothing padding the invoice.
Who books this
Built for
Founders who have supply lined up and need somewhere to put it
Operators running a marketplace on WhatsApp and spreadsheets today
Anyone told a marketplace is a six-month, six-figure build
Real situations
Five ways this shows up, and what actually fixes it.
Not hypothetical — the shape of the problem before someone books this sprint, and the specific part of the build that resolves it.
Situation 1
Running the marketplace on WhatsApp and a spreadsheet
An operator already has both sides of a market — buyers and sellers — coordinating manually through chat groups and a shared spreadsheet that's starting to buckle under the volume.
Both sides get a real app with listings, search and Stripe checkout, replacing the manual coordination without losing the community that's already there.
Situation 2
Supply lined up, no platform to put it on
A founder has genuine supply-side relationships secured — sellers ready to list — but no product for buyers to actually browse and transact through.
One category, one city, one working checkout ships in 30 days, so the supply already secured has somewhere real to go.
Situation 3
Told a marketplace needs six months and six figures
A founder got a quote assuming full escrow, multi-country payouts and dispute resolution from day one, ballooning a focused v1 into a year-long enterprise build.
V1 launches with Stripe Connect handling payments and payouts for one category and one city — the larger regulated features come later, honestly, not by default.
Situation 4
Cold-start problem nobody has actually solved yet
A founder has a beautifully designed marketplace concept but no concrete plan for how the first fifty listings get onto it before anyone visits.
The scoping call is explicitly about the supply plan first — the software gets built around how those first fifty listings actually arrive, not despite it.
Situation 5
Taking a cut manually, invoice by invoice
An operator currently calculates and requests their commission by hand after every transaction, which doesn't scale past a handful of deals a week.
Stripe Connect automates the split — buyers pay, the cut is held back, sellers are paid out on a schedule the operator controls, no manual invoicing.
The honest part
When 30 days is the wrong answer.
A fixed deadline only works when the scope genuinely fits inside it. These are the cases where I will tell you so rather than take the booking.
Escrow, milestone payments or multi-country payouts — each is a regulated problem of its own and I will scope it separately rather than squeeze it into the month.
Marketplaces with no supply lined up. The software is not the hard part; a beautiful empty marketplace is still empty, and I would rather say so before you spend the money.
Dispute resolution, insurance or identity verification programmes, which are operations as much as they are features.
Inside the 30 days
- Both sides designed — the people listing and the people buying
- Listings with photos, categories, availability and search
- Filtering and sort that works on a phone, not just desktop
- Payments through Stripe, including the split to your sellers
- Accounts, profiles, reviews and in-app messaging
- An admin view so you can approve, remove and refund without me
- Live on the web, plus mobile apps if the scope suits it
- Source code, design files and 30 days of support at handover
Quoted as one number before day one. A week running long is mine to absorb.
Outside the line
- Escrow, milestone payments or multi-country payouts — each is a regulated problem of its own and I will scope it separately rather than squeeze it into the month.
- Marketplaces with no supply lined up. The software is not the hard part; a beautiful empty marketplace is still empty, and I would rather say so before you spend the money.
- Dispute resolution, insurance or identity verification programmes, which are operations as much as they are features.
Real work, sized and priced separately. You hear it before you book, not at handover.
Questions
Before you book
Yes, for one category in one city with one way to transact. What breaks the timeline is trying to launch three categories, two countries and four payment methods at once. The scoping call exists to cut v1 down to the version that can actually go live, and everything else becomes v2.
Other sprints
30 days from now, this could be live.
A 30-minute call decides whether the scope fits. If it doesn't, I'll tell you what would.