Your marketplace profile is not a brand

Marketplaces are good at being where the habit already is. That is a real advantage, and pretending otherwise is how agencies sound pious. If your first guests will only ever look inside one app, be in that app.

The problem starts when the profile becomes the business. The photographs are cropped to their grid. The voice is their form fields. A slice of every booking leaves before you’ve paid the stylist, the kiln, the laundry. And the guest who already loves you still has to go through a door with someone else’s name on it.

A direct site has to be easier than the app, not merely more virtuous. Easier means: the time I want is visible, the price is the price, the confirmation arrives, the reminder arrives, and I am not asked to create an account to sit in a chair I have sat in twelve times.

You can keep the marketplace for strangers and take everyone else home. That is the usual shape. What doesn’t work is a site that apologises for existing and a profile that does all the work. Then you are renting your own demand.

We don’t rip tools out for sport. We ask what the guest-facing layer is for, and who it belongs to. If the answer is “them”, the margin and the memory of the customer belong to them too.