After a decade of building and running marketplaces, one thing became clear. To win, you have to stay alive.
That is the job. Not the deck. Not the roadmap. Stay alive.
Consumer marketplaces take years to find an audience, prove value, and build liquidity. Nobody builds a two-sided market in a quarter. But payroll does not run on a marketplace timeline. It runs on the 1st and the 15th.
First it is an engineer because it cannot be you anymore. You are buried in operations, support, and social. Then a second engineer. Then support. Then marketing. Six to eight people before you have proven the thing works.
At a 10% take rate, one fully loaded $180K hire needs $1.8 million in GMV. Just to exist. Not to grow. Not to market. To exist.
Six people need $10.8 million.
So you are burning $150K a month, and every dollar of it was supposed to go to growth. Instead Steve shipped a feature nobody asked for while the chat bug he was supposed to fix sent Nicole her fortieth ticket this week.
That capital could have exploded your market. It built a software company you never wanted to run.
Keep the people who know your category. Stop rebuilding the software company.
Cliqket brings the platform, operators, agents, and engineering capacity. We have built and operated marketplaces from first sale through exit. We are in it from your first transaction forward.