A
Ruled out
A negotiation-assist tool
Templates, rate cards, in-app chat. Easiest to build — and it would have made the five weeks politer, not shorter.
The haggling survives.
The Two-Minute Deal
5 min readMVP shippedA sponsorship between a nano-influencer and a local business took up to five weeks of DMs before any content existed. We built a mobile marketplace that closes the same deal in about two minutes — not by making negotiation faster, but by designing it out of the transaction.
CONTEXT
The marketplace nobody built for the small players
Influencer platforms are built for big brands and top creators. That leaves out the pair with the most natural fit: a creator with a few thousand engaged local followers, and the shop down the street who needs exactly those people. With no platform between them, both sides fell back on cold DMs, and a deal small enough to be casual took five weeks to close.
We set out to build the missing marketplace, with an MVP due in three months.
Owned
Interviews & journey mapDeal mechanism0→1Design system
Partnered on
Founder — business modelEngineering — MVP build
Constraint
Three months to MVP: every open question had to resolve into something shippable.
Problem · The two sides
Two sides of the same deal
Maya, 26
Nano-influencer · 4.8K followers
“I spend more time pitching myself in DMs than actually making content.”
Goals
Steady local sponsorships that fit her audience, with clear terms up front.
Frustrations
Weeks of cold outreach and haggling; brands ghost when they hear her follower count.
Daniel, 41
Café owner · 2 locations
“Agencies quote me thousands. I just want locals to know we exist.”
Goals
Affordable creators nearby, and one simple signal that a campaign worked.
Frustrations
Can’t find cost-effective creators; no time or tools to track results himself.
Problem · Where the time goes
Six weeks lost to negotiation and reporting
Interviews and surveys showed both sides bleeding time in the same place: negotiation ran up to five weeks, reporting another week; nobody could afford professional tools.
The journey map pointed at three phases worth attacking: negotiation, creation, measurement. The brief: streamline the collaboration itself.
Influencer journey map, before the app
≈ 6 weeks lost per campaign
1 · Negotiation
up to 5 weeks
2 · Content creation
days
3 · Measurement
another week
Doing
Cold DMs, repeated intros, haggling over price and terms
Visits the business, creates and posts, reworks through revision rounds
Assembles engagement numbers into a report by hand
Feeling
😖
worn down before work starts
😊
the part they came for
😩
unpaid admin at the end
Pain
No way to start a deal without weeks of conversation
Revisions pile up: no shared expectations
Tracking tools priced for agencies, not individuals
The two low points became the design brief: remove negotiation, fold measurement into the deal.
Strategy
Assist the negotiation, run it, or delete it
“Fix the five weeks” had three plausible products inside it:
B
Ruled out
An agency-lite service
Humans matching both sides. It solves trust instantly and scales exactly as fast as we could hire — with three people, we become the five weeks.
Scales at the speed of hiring.
C
Chosen
A self-serve marketplace with standardized deals
The only path where deal time does not scale with headcount — and the riskiest, because it bets everything on one assumption: both sides will accept terms nobody negotiated.
One bet, tested before we built.
SOLUTION · THE MECHANISM
Remove the negotiation, keep the trust
There was no existing product to fix: no listings, no contracts, no reporting. The whole deal had to be invented as a sequence: publish the terms so nobody negotiates, turn delivery into a checklist so nobody reports, and hold both in one place so nobody hunts.
01
Tiers instead of negotiation
What is it worth?
02
A checklist instead of a report
How do I prove it?
03
One page instead of a scattered deal
Would I even go?
How the idea became three screens
Each screen exists because one question had to be answered before the next could be asked, and each answer forced what the screen had to hold.
Solution · Why it works
Why both sides accept a price nobody negotiated
Fixed tiers work only if each side gains more from the standard than from haggling. Businesses get a menu for an unpriceable question — what is a post worth? — at a floor far below any agency quote. Creators get published terms and never pitch themselves again.
Each side trades a little pricing power for certainty — the one thing five weeks of DMs never produced. The tiers are not a price list; they are a peace treaty.
Process · Zero to one
None of it arrived fully formed
PHASE 01: STRUCTURE
Product site map
The whole app is four destinations, and the deal lives on one of them: the Business page carries Details, Tiers, and Tasks, so a collaboration never leaves it.
The Two-Minute Deal
Mobile app
Browse
Local businesses, filtered by area and category
Business page
The whole deal, one tabbed page
My deals
Active collaborations and payment status
Profile
Creator reach, past work, payout details
Details
Business info, requirements, terms
Tiers
50+ · 150+ · 400+ likes, one tap to accept
Tasks
Visit, post, screenshot the likes
PHASE 02: IDEATE
Decide the mechanism before the screens
Ideation with the PM and engineering converged on the structural moves: tier-based contracts to kill negotiation, post-campaign Tasks to kill the report. Debating the mechanism, not the UI, made weak ideas cheap to throw away.
Final design
⤢Click to enlarge
Impact · Outcome
deal time
~2 min
average time from opening a business’s Details page to confirming a contract
adoption
900+
influencers and 132+ local businesses onboarded in the first six months
growth
20–30%
daily user growth after launch
Reflection
Three months meant choosing imperfect answers on purpose, and saying so. Likes are not a real business metric: gameable, blind to sales. But a legible, launchable metric both sides understood beat a rigorous one we could not ship. Growth suggests the trade was right; verified redemptions and repeat-rate tracking were how we would pay the debt down. Early-stage maturity is not the perfect answer; it is knowing which imperfections you are shipping, and why.
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