The marketplace roadmap framework for non-technical founders.
Diagnose what’s holding your marketplace back, score your bets against the eight criteria that actually matter, and walk away with a Kanban roadmap and editable PRDs.
Free during beta. No credit card. Built by Marketplace Studio, a Sharetribe Expert Partner with 30+ marketplace builds.
Most marketplace founders don’t have a roadmap problem.
They have a sequencing problem.
You’ve read the advice. Supply first. Solve the chicken-and-egg problem. Find your first 100 users by hand. Build the minimum lovable product, not the minimum viable one. None of it is wrong. None of it tells you what to do this month.
The gap between "marketplace strategy" and "the next thing I should build" is where most non-technical founders stall. You end up shipping the feature that feels obvious instead of the one that moves the constraint. You build for the side of the marketplace that’s loud instead of the side that’s actually blocked. You spend three months on something shiny and look up to realize your supply problem hasn’t moved.
This tool exists because there is a method for that decision, and most founders don’t have access to it. The method is A-CAR.
What is the A-CAR method?
A-CAR stands for Attract, Convert, Adopt, Retain. It is a marketplace strategy framework developed by Marketplace Studio over 30+ marketplace builds. Most product frameworks treat the funnel as four parallel things to work on at once. A-CAR doesn’t. It treats the four pillars as a sequence — the constraint you focus on depends on the stage your marketplace is in. A pre-launch founder has an Attract problem. A founder with thousands of sign-ups and a handful of repeat transactions has an Adopt problem. The methodology tells you which question to be asking, and the tool helps you answer it.
How do we get the right personas to find and discover what we built?
The Attract pillar covers everything from cold-start strategy and supply acquisition to positioning, SEO, paid acquisition, and word-of-mouth loops. For most marketplaces, Attract is a supply problem first and a demand problem second — there is no point pulling demand to a platform with no inventory. Pre-launch and pre-MVP founders spend almost all of their time in this pillar.
The constraint to look for: we don’t have enough of the right people showing up.
How do we get the people we attracted to take the action we built for?
Conversion in a marketplace is two-sided. Supply needs to convert from sign-up to a complete, high-quality listing. Demand needs to convert from sign-up (or anonymous browse) to a first transaction. The friction lives in onboarding, in the gap between sign-up and first action, in trust signals, and in the core transaction flow itself.
The constraint to look for: people are showing up but not finishing the action that makes the marketplace work.
How do we get users to come back and actually use this thing?
Adoption is what happens after the first transaction. It’s about stickiness, frequency, second-and-third-transaction behavior, and the U-factor — the rate at which one-sided users become two-sided participants. Adoption is where defensibility starts to live, because a marketplace with strong adoption is one where users have built a habit.
The constraint to look for: we get first transactions but very few second ones.
How sticky is this — and how durable is the loop?
Retention is the long arc. K-factor (referral-driven growth), churn, lifetime value, network density, and the question of whether your marketplace gets more valuable to a user the longer they stay. Retention is the last pillar by design — it cannot be solved before adoption, and adoption cannot be solved before conversion. Founders who try to skip ahead to retention work on the wrong problem.
The constraint to look for: we get repeat behavior but the loop isn’t compounding.
The four pillars are not weights. They are stages. The methodology assumes that at any given moment one of them is your active constraint, and the job of a marketplace roadmap is to identify that constraint and concentrate the next 4–8 weeks of work against it. The A-CAR Marketplace Roadmap tool walks you through that identification, then gives you the structure to plan against it.
How A-CAR evaluates a bet:
the eight criteria.
Every strategic bet on your roadmap gets pressure-tested against eight criteria. Most prioritization frameworks use two (effort and impact) or three (RICE). Two or three isn’t enough for a marketplace, because a marketplace bet has to satisfy two sides at once, has to fit the product you’ve already built, and has to compound — not just ship. The eight criteria are designed to flush out the bets that look exciting but don’t survive contact with the methodology.
Effort
How much work it takes to get this across the finish line — development hours, marketing time, design, ops.
Marketplaces are won by sequencing, not output. Effort matters most when it competes with the bet you should be working on instead.
Impact
How this affects the targeted users — or the business.
A bet that’s impactful for supply may be neutral for demand, or vice versa. A-CAR forces you to name which side this is for.
Cost
The cost to build this, plus the cost to keep serving it.
Most founders track build cost and ignore serve cost. Marketplaces are full of features that were cheap to ship and expensive to keep alive.
Cohesiveness
How this bet fits with your vision and the product you already have.
A bet that doesn’t fit creates a fragmented experience and confuses both sides. The point of a roadmap is concentration, not breadth.
Shininess (inverse)
Is this something new and exciting with little real value, or does it have genuine utility?
Shiny bets are how founders waste their best quarter. This criterion is scored in reverse — the less shiny, the better the bet.
Throughput
How this plays out across our team’s flow over the days, weeks, and months after launch.
Does this bet block other work or unlock it? A high-throughput bet creates room for the next bet. A low-throughput bet eats the next two months.
Time-to-Value
How fast a user feels the win, and whether that win is defensible and repeatable.
A bet with a slow time-to-value can still be right, but it needs to be sequenced behind something that delivers faster. Defensibility is what stops a competitor from copying the win once you’ve shipped it.
Support
What dependencies or supporting initiatives this bet needs to actually work.
Most failed bets are not failed bets. They are bets that shipped without the support they needed — without the content, the operations, the trust layer, the second feature that completes the loop.
You score each bet against the eight criteria, weighed against your stage and your diagnosed constraint. The tool’s AI pressure-tests your scoring against your context, your diagnostic, and the methodology — flags the gaps, suggests bets you haven’t considered, and helps you sequence what’s on the board.
Liquidity is the metric.
Most founders never measure it.
A marketplace without liquidity is a directory. With it, the marketplace compounds. The Liquidity Sub-Tool teaches you what liquidity means for your marketplace type and stage, lets you set targets, and re-evaluates every bet through a liquidity lens.
Match Rate
What fraction of supply gets used, or demand fulfilled, within a tolerable window. Below threshold, demand churns.
Time to Match
Median time from a listing, request, or search to a completed match. Below threshold, the marketplace feels broken even if matches eventually happen.
Density
How concentrated supply and demand are in a geographic or category bucket where matching is possible. Below threshold, it isn’t a marketplace yet in that bucket.
Health Score & AI diagnosis
A weighted 0–10 score with a confidence indicator that honors what you actually measured. A two-to-three sentence AI diagnosis names the constraining axis and prescribes a next action — supply-first when supply is the bottleneck.
The Liquidity Lens on your Kanban
Toggle the lens on and every bet on the board recolors by its impact on liquidity. Cards re-rank by a liquidity-adjusted score. A banner across the top names the constraining axis and counts which bets actually move it.
Type- and stage-aware
Definitions and thresholds are tuned to Service, Rental, and Product marketplaces, and they scale by stage — a post-MVP founder is held to a different bar than a scaling one.
Captured in the wizard, refined on the board
Step 3 of the wizard captures liquidity. The Liquidity Panel on the Kanban toolbar is the same data, two entries — update it as your numbers move.
The Liquidity Sub-Tool is built into the standard $0 beta. No add-on, no separate sign-up.
From a blank page to a roadmap,
in seven steps.
The tool walks you through the A-CAR method, then maintains a living roadmap board you come back to.
Context
You describe your marketplace: model, niche, stage (pre-launch, post-MVP, early traction, scaling), and the geography you serve. Stage is the most important answer here — it determines which questions you see in the next step.
Personas
You define one to six personas across Supply and Demand. The AI drafts the persona from a one-line seed, blanking demographics it can’t confidently infer. From this step on, every downstream AI call references your personas by name.
Liquidity
You set targets and current readings against the three axes that define liquidity for your marketplace type: Match Rate, Time to Match, and Density. The tool computes a Liquidity Health Score and a one-paragraph diagnosis. From here on, every bet on the board is rated for its impact on liquidity.
Diagnostic
A stage-aware diagnostic walks you through 6–10 short questions designed to surface your actual constraint. A pre-launch founder gets Attract-focused questions about cold-start and supply acquisition. A scaling founder gets Adopt and Retain questions about K-factor, U-conversion, and churn. The AI then summarizes the three to five most likely constraints, in plain language — referencing your personas and your liquidity readings.
Vision
Two short prompts: what does success look like in six months, and how will you know it’s working? No AI on this step. This is your words, and it becomes the lens the AI uses to sanity-check everything that comes next.
Bets
You articulate three to seven strategic bets that you believe will move you toward your vision. Each bet gets tagged with an A-CAR pillar, a target persona, and an EROI (Now / Short-term / Long-term). The AI pressure-tests each bet against your context, your diagnostic, your liquidity state, and the eight criteria — and can suggest one to three bets you haven’t considered.
Roadmap
Your bets become Kanban cards. You drag them into Now / Next / Later. Flip on the Liquidity Lens and the board re-ranks: cards recolor by impact on liquidity and a banner names the constraining axis. The AI can suggest a sequence with per-bet rationale, but the decision is yours.
Then: generate PRDs
For any bet on the board, you can generate an adaptive PRD — a Product Requirements Document tailored to the bet’s type (feature, operational, or experiment) and your specific context. The first draft is editable, sectionable, and shareable. It is the bridge between strategy and the person who’s going to build the thing.
See a real marketplace roadmap
before you sign up.
Nick runs a mobile auto detailing marketplace. He’s post-MVP, low repeat transactions, and trying to figure out whether to invest in supply onboarding, demand acquisition, or a trust feature. His full roadmap — context, diagnostic, vision, bets across all four A-CAR pillars, and a Now / Next / Later board with one fully generated PRD — is available as a public demo.
Open the demo roadmapWho this is built for.
The A-CAR Marketplace Roadmap is built specifically for marketplace founders. Not e-commerce founders. Not SaaS founders. Not generic product managers. If you’re building anything other than a two-sided platform, the methodology won’t fit.
Pre-launch / pre-MVP
You have an idea, maybe a brand, maybe a landing page collecting emails. The diagnostic focuses on cold-start strategy, supply acquisition, and the design-thinking work that has to happen before there’s data to look at.
Post-MVP / early traction
You’ve launched. You have some sign-ups, some transactions, but the gap between sign-up and first transaction is too big — or the gap between first transaction and second transaction is. The diagnostic focuses on conversion and adoption.
Scaling
You have repeat behavior and a working loop, but growth is plateauing or churn is creeping. The diagnostic focuses on adoption depth, retention, and the defensibility of your network effects.
Built by Marketplace Studio.
Marketplace Studio is a marketplace development and strategy firm based in Canada. We’ve spent the last several years building, advising, and rescuing two-sided platforms for non-technical founders — across services, products, niche B2B, community-driven commerce, and rentals. The A-CAR method was developed in the field, on real marketplaces, and refined across 30+ builds.
This tool is free during beta because the methodology is more useful when more founders use it. If you want hands-on help applying A-CAR to your specific marketplace — strategy, audits, build, or scale — Marketplace Studio is where you go next.
Learn more about Marketplace StudioFrequently asked questions.
Stop guessing what to build next.
Apply the A-CAR method to your marketplace in about 20 minutes. Walk away with a roadmap, a sequence, and PRDs you can hand to whoever’s building.