Commercial & Growth Lead wanted, proven marketplace concept, building from scratch
I've validated a niche marketplace idea the hard way, with real users, real money, real demand. Now I'm starting fresh to build it properly, and I need a business-minded co-founder to take the lead on growth.
This isn't a side project or a speculative pitch, the concept works and had early revenue. What we're doing now is building the right version of it, which means we're at day zero with conviction rather than just hope.
One head start: the SEO groundwork is already solid, strong search visibility and click-through rates that most early-stage projects take months to earn.
In terms of how we'd work: I like sprint and milestone-based progress. You'd always know what we're building towards and why, no ambiguity about priorities, just clear goals and the freedom to own how you hit them.
The role:
You'd be the Commercial & Growth Lead, owning go-to-market, customer acquisition, partnerships, and eventually commercial hiring. I'll handle the product and tech.
This starts as a revenue share arrangement, with the expectation of growing into a proper founding role as the business scales.
Ideal background:
- Experience scaling a marketplace or two-sided platform
- Entrepreneurial - you've built or grown something from zero
- Can move fast without needing a lot of structure
We're focused on the UK market, so a UK-based background is a strong advantage - but if you know the market well and are based elsewhere, we'd still love to hear from you.
Happy to share more detail in a conversation. Interested? Tell me a bit about what you've built or grown.
Hi Steven, interesting post and I would be keen to understand more about the product offering. In terms of what you are looking for here (Commercial & Growth Lead) these are not my areas of speciality, if I am completely honest. But if you need someone to look after day-to-day ops, customer success, service, retention etc once you have a customer base - essentially all the unglamorous things that are required to keep the ship pointed in the right direction - then I would be happy to have a conversation. (Also, just FYI, I am from the UK).
This really resonates — I'm in a similar boat. I built Hello First, a voice-first blind dating app (users interact via audio profiles and turn-based reveals, no photos at first), and the tech is live. But scaling a consumer social product without a growth-minded co-pilot is like driving with one hand. I've been looking for exactly this kind of partnership: someone who owns the commercial/growth side while I focus on the product. Good luck finding your co-founder, Steven — the fact that you've already validated the concept before bringing someone on is the smart way to do it. It builds trust from day one.
Appreciate it! Funnily enough I've been in the dating/community space since 2018, so I know exactly the 'one hand on the wheel' feeling you're describing. Hope you find your co-pilot!
What stood out to me is the phrase "building it properly."
Founders often use that phrase when they're convinced something important was learned the first time around.
Sometimes the lesson is exactly right.
Sometimes the lesson becomes so convincing that it quietly stops competing with other explanations.
That's what I'd be most curious about here.
That's a fair question to ask.
The specific lesson I learnt was that I had a commercial partner who changed the brand name three times over the life of the project (within 12 months). For a marketplace that lives and dies by search visibility, that's a compounding problem each time where rankings are built, then reset, then built again, then reset again.
The SEO and technical foundations held up well throughout with Search Console data to prove it. The commercial execution around them didn't.
So the lesson I've taken isn't "I was right and they were wrong", it's that I underestimated how much damage instability at the commercial layer could do to everything beneath it, and I stayed with that dynamic longer than I should have.
What I'm doing differently this time is keeping strategic direction closer, being more deliberate about who owns what, and working in milestones so there are regular moments to course-correct rather than drift.
I won't pretend the solution is clear cut, but I'm pretty confident I know where things went wrong.
That's actually the part I'd be most interested in.
Not whether the lesson is wrong.
Whether it's the lesson that deserves the most confidence going forward.
Happy to continue by email if useful.
I've done a deep post-mortem on this one, the commercial misalignment is well documented and the structural fixes are already in place. I'm confident about the direction, and whoever comes on to this project will have a complete support system from day one.
Possibly.
I'd just be careful that a lesson can become very persuasive because it explains a lot of what happened.
Sometimes that's exactly what makes it dangerous to stop competing with alternative explanations.
That's usually where I'd spend the most time if I were looking at it.