The company — a B2B recruiting platform — was betting its future on a marketplace model: multiple freelance recruiters competing to fill the same roles. Building that directly into the core platform meant months of engineering against unvalidated assumptions.
My proposal: don't. Build a standalone PoC first, put real recruiters and real roles in it, and let live behavior answer the questions before core engineering starts.
The stakes were real by design — the roles were live openings, the company's own hiring across engineering, product, sales, and marketing, plus client roles run through an account manager. We weren't simulating a marketplace; we were betting our own hires on it. I owned the whole thing: product strategy with the CEO, UX, UI, frontend and backend build (AI-assisted), deployment, and instrumentation.
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THE CORE DECISION
Private pipelines.
Every recruiter sees only their own candidates — competition exists, but is never visible friction. This single choice, made in week 1, is why activation never became the problem everyone feared.
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Supply — the thing everyone worried about — turned out to be the healthy part.
"Recruiters were sending profiles that had nothing to do with the role — and nobody had given them a way to ask."
— a hiring manager, in a production note
Not a sourcing-quality gap — a calibration gap. The bottleneck isn't recruiter activation; it's pipeline progression. That reframing redirected what the core platform prioritized — before a single line of core code was written.
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The insights gathered from real usage reshaped product priorities and became the blueprint for the marketplace now running inside the platform.
Shipped in the core platform today
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NEXT PROJECT
Designing a scalable, compliant platform for safer transfusion diagnostics.