A two-sided marketplace, shipped and live

The engagement

The client was a startup building a web marketplace connecting local homeowners, skilled tradespeople, and real-estate professionals - post a home-improvement job, receive and accept contractor bids, message, and exchange referrals. David was the Rails developer, brought on to build features and ship the consumer launch with the founder and a small team - MVP product engineering against a real launch date.

What we did

• Shipped the bidding flow - the job-detail view, bid list, accept-bid action, and the transactional emails behind it (bid offered, updated, accepted). The bid-to-acceptance path is the marketplace’s core workflow.
• Fixed the bid background-job pipeline - a mailer job was failing on a missing helper; loaded the right helpers into the ActionMailer context so the jobs completed. Silent background-job failures are backend problems users only notice as missing email.
• Built the “post a job to your network” feature and the referral and invitation system.
• Built network-member profiles - company, region, phone, and URL fields - and fixed a profile bug where licenses didn’t show without insurance.
• Ran production operations - Heroku production and staging, Sentry error monitoring, New Relic APM, Twilio, and transactional email. If Heroku costs become the constraint later, that’s a migration off Heroku.

Getting a two-sided marketplace to a live consumer launch in a month is a custom product build run at startup pace. If you have a launch date and no team, start here.

Stack

• Ruby on Rails
• Heroku
• Sentry / New Relic
• Twilio