Challenge
A first-time founder set out to launch a marketplace connecting households with trusted professionals for repairs and home services in Luxembourg. Similar platforms are established in the neighbouring countries; Luxembourg had none.
That gap was the opportunity and the risk. A two-sided marketplace is only as good as its weakest side: customers leave if there is nobody to book, and professionals leave if nobody books them. And there was no budget for a marketing team to fill both sides by hand. The platform had to bring people in on its own.
Solution
We treated acquisition as part of the product, not something to bolt on after launch. The brand, the search strategy and the acquisition model were designed together with the marketplace itself, so every page a customer can land on is also a page that brings the next customer in.
In practice that means a page for every service in every location, built to be found by people searching for exactly that job; a brand that reads as local and trustworthy in a market that values both; an onboarding flow that takes a professional from sign-up to first job with as little friction as possible; and a referral loop that turns every finished job into the start of the next one.
Execution
Discovery, in three sessions
We worked through the business with the founder in three sessions: vision, brand and positioning first; then the user journeys and what to build first; then the launch plan and roadmap. Starting with one city and expanding from there was decided early, because density matters more than coverage in a marketplace.
One brand across every channel
We built the brand from the ground up: name, identity and the voice the platform speaks in, then a strategy for each channel it would appear in, from search to social to the messages customers receive. One brand system means the marketplace looks and sounds the same wherever someone meets it, which is what makes a new name feel trustworthy.
An SEO system, not a set of pages
Search is the cheapest channel a marketplace has, so we designed it as a system. The page structure follows how people actually search: a service, a place, a problem. Pages are generated from the marketplace's own data, so every new service or professional adds to what can be found. Tracking is wired in from the start, so the founder can see which pages bring in customers and which bring in professionals.
Acquisition built into the product
Both sides of the marketplace have their own way in. Customers arrive through search and referrals; professionals through dedicated pages, a short onboarding and the promise of jobs nearby. The referral loop sits inside the product, at the moment a job is finished and the customer is happiest. The build runs in monthly milestones, each one adding to how the platform grows, towards a launch in December 2026.
