5 min read
Building marketplace workflows: submission → review → listing
A marketplace is only as good as its supply, and supply arrives through a pipeline you have to build before anyone shows up.
Mini Cast Store went from nothing to 1,500+ signups in its first week, and almost none of that was the marketplace UI. It was the pipeline behind it.
Three stages
- Submission — developers provide metadata, links and proof the app works. The friction here directly determines your supply, so every field you add costs you listings.
- Review — automated checks for the mechanical failures, manual review for quality. This stage is the product. It is the only thing separating a marketplace from a link dump.
- Listing — publication and surfacing into discovery.
The cold-start reality
Nobody tells you that the first two weeks of a marketplace are not engineering. Developers will not submit to an empty catalogue and users will not browse one, so the opening move is manual outreach until there is enough supply to be worth looking at.
25+ developers listed in that first push. The pipeline mattered afterwards, when submissions started arriving faster than I could look at them by hand.
The number that mattered
1,500 signups against 150 daily actives. Acquisition was never the problem. That gap is the entire roadmap.