1. How are you different from other development teams?

We are a team of developers specializing in one thing only — marketplaces. After building many, we decided to invest in a mythology that allows us to leverage vetted components and libraries. This enables us to cut development time — and thus costs — by a factor of 3 to 5 times. A team of 3 backend and frontend developers, an architect, a PM, an art director, designers and QA team will work on each marketplace site for 2–3 months to build the individual customized workflow and UIs.

Think of us as your de facto technical co-founders — we develop, maintain and advance your product so you can focus on your business, funding and user acquisition.

2. Why can't I just build my own team?

You can of course! But most peer-to-peer marketplace startups in seed stage have to raise millions of dollars before they even have a working prototype. You'll need to find strong talent in a very competitive market, deal with risks and challenges and likely spend a year before your first public alpha.

Common challenges include lesser quality code, architecture that is not built for growth, many critical functionalities are either sacrifcied or not well implemented. Often first versions are slow, crash a lot and honestly… are just plain awful. Even a talented team needs time to figure out the best solution. If the team you put together has never worked together before, you can expect the above issues to increase exponentially.

We are offering an unique opportunity to go live with a strong technical foundation in just 2–3 months for a fraction of a traditional ground-up development cost.

3. Is the design included?

Yes, we have excellent design partners with whom we work exclusively. Design is another expertise yet critical to a good user experience. To maximize the design and take advantage of this super fast delivery, we work with our design partners at Lugh Studio. They know our system extremely well and how to design for it.

4. What about localization?

Every app we build comes already set up in 2 languages out of the gate. You can easily add more. If you need assistance in translation, we work closely with Eriksen Translations. Eriksen has been helping companies localize for over 30 years. In fact, Skype used them to localize in 54 languages from when they were a start-up until they were acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 Billion.

5. What are some peer-to-peer marketplace sites are comparable to what you could do for us?

AirBnb, WyzAnt, Fiverr, Handy, GrubHub, Getaround, TaskRabbit —just to name a few. YES, we are talking about that level of marketplace.

6. Do I pay the entire amount upfront?

For the informational architecture phase which results in the wireframe for the marketplace, it is a flat fee of $50K payable in full in advance.

For the development of the marketplace (based on the wireframes), we bill in 2 week increments over the course of 3 months, typically 6 payments.

7. Can’t I just build a cheaper MVP?

The traditional MVP no longer works. Users’ attention span is getting shorter and shorter. They expect product quality to be in alignment with big sites, competition is tough and the cost of MVP development can easily top $100K (despite what developers may initially estimate.) Check out this great calculator from SVSG for a high-level ballpark of what you can expect to pay in the industry.

The concept replacing Minimum Viable Product is Minimum Lovable Product. And this MLP is what we focus on — building a product that doesn't have tons of unused features, is initially focused on UX, and is based on a strong foundation for future growth.

Everything you see in our offering (locales, mobile apps, API, social logins, etc.) is included as part of our vetted core codebase. Our prices just cover 2–3 months of intense work for a team of 8 (Architect/PM, 4 front-end and backend developers, designer/UX, art director, and QA) to build your MLP that users will respond to and love.

8. Sorry, your prices are out of my budget

We understand on the surface this may sound like a lot. And while it is a lot of money, it’s an incredible value for a peer-to-peer marketplace. It is the equivalent of the annual cost of just one mediocre developer in NYC or London. And it would be a pretty tall order to find such a developer who could build you a marketplace of this caliber — let alone in 3 months.

If you don’t have sufficient funds to build your marketplace, you can either raise the funds or you can check out sharetribe — an inexpensive DIY off-shelf marketplace builder that can be great option to get things going. They’re able to offer the prices they do because you need to fit within their framework. Unfortunately, to date, we are not aware on any successful VC funding or significant revenue coming from any off-the-shelf marketplace product. And there is a good reason for that. At some point you need to scale and adjust your business processes and workflow and that is much harder (if even possible) with off-the-shelf solutions. When that happens you basically have to scrap what you've done and build your own system from scratch. All of that means much longer times before you can see real revenue and an overall development cost FAR in excess of what we are offering.

9. I have developers that I want on my team. How can I use them?

Building a custom peer-to-peer marketplace is one thing. This we do with our team. Iterating on it is another. We bring you to launch. At that point you have the option to take the code (it’s yours) and have your team take it from there. We supply full technical documentation. They will be set up for success. You can also choose to continue to engage us to support your development. It’s totally up to you.

10. Who owns the IP once we launch?

Our apps consists of a mix of our vetted code and custom written code. We own the copyright to anything we wrote before beginning the engagement and license you non-exclusive rights to use, modify, display, sell, and derive from our code upon full payment under this agreement. Everything we custom write for you belongs to you. Period.

11. Where are you guys located?

We are team of developers located in Brooklyn, with team members in Portland, Lisbon and London. We like the food here.

12. Hmmm… this seems too good to be true. Is there a catch?

While we are leveraging a massive amount of the programming to get you to market super fast and at a fraction of the regular costs, no two marketing sites at this level are identical. Those differences need to be explored together with you to determine what can and cannot be included in the MLP. Fear not, we are not selling you a car without a steering wheel here. What we are bringing to the table is a fully-functional, custom-built marketplace.

We include a lot of customization and custom logic in our price. But as anyone savvy in this space knows that needs to be hammered out. Some requirements can be too big to be included in our fixed cost, 3 month offer. For example, exporting products from a vendor's API would probably fall out of scope, while making pre-approving registration would make it in. In any case, we will discuss with you all features and workflow before we start to ensure full transparency and zero surprises.