Show IH I built a two-sided expert gig marketplace in a week. Here's what I learned.
I've been hiring and getting hired on freelance platforms for 20 years — Upwork, Fiverr, dice.com, staffing firms. They all have the same problem: too much friction, too much theater, and somebody working both sides of the table.
So I built the thing I actually wanted.
Brief Work (briefwork.io) is a marketplace for short-burst expert gigs. One deliverable, one screening question, no cover letter. Clients post a brief for $50 — that fee filters out tire-kickers and funds the AI that helps them write a usable brief. Workers apply free, answer the question, name a price.
Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router) + Supabase + Stripe. Deployed to Vercel in about a week.
What I got wrong first:
Next.js 16 doesn't use middleware.ts for Supabase auth — it's proxy.ts
Stripe checkout prefills email from the last session unless you pass customer_email explicitly
useSearchParams needs to be wrapped in Suspense or the build fails
What worked immediately: Stripe webhooks activating briefs on payment. Cleaner than I expected.
The cold start problem: I solved it by being my own first client. I have four real briefs posted — placard design, legal advice, accounting advice, marketing plan. These are things I actually need done. I'm also posted as a worker for rapid prototyping gigs. Being on your own platform is the marketing.
If you've launched or marketed a two-sided marketplace, one of my briefs is literally for you.
One thing I'd add to marketplace learning: distribution isn't just "are you ranking on Google" anymore.
I've been asking founders who built marketplaces whether they audited what ChatGPT/Perplexity says about their category before launch. The pattern I see: almost no one checks. But those LLMs have opinions — formed from training data (reviews, forum threads, comparison posts) — and those opinions already exist before you launch.
If someone asks ChatGPT "what's the best marketplace for [your niche]", the answer was baked in months ago from crawled data. You're not in the training set, so you don't exist to the AI layer.
Curious if you thought about AI discovery when you built yours, or if it was purely SEO/direct?
The strongest part here is the “short-burst expert gig” framing. That feels much sharper than trying to compete with Upwork or Fiverr as a broad freelance marketplace. One deliverable, one screening question, no cover letter, and a paid client brief is a cleaner wedge because it removes the performance theater on both sides.
I’d probably make “brief-first expert work” the center of the positioning. The $50 client fee is not just monetization, it is a quality filter. That makes the marketplace feel less like cheap labor discovery and more like scoped professional execution.
One thing I’d watch is the Brief Work name. It explains the mechanic well, but it may stay very descriptive if this grows into a more serious expert-work network. A brandable SaaS-style name like Beryxa .com could give it more room to become a trusted marketplace rather than just a “brief posting” tool.