Turning around a failing marketplace. 4× MRR.

Revenue was falling every year, and nobody could say why.

MakersRow launched in 2014 and grew to roughly $9M ARR. From 2018 the line turned and never turned back, declining year on year to $25K MRR by the time we were brought in as product owner in 2022.

The company knew revenue was falling. That was the whole of what it knew. Engineering, sales, marketing and operations each held a different section of the picture, and none held enough of it to act. Sales was promising features that did not exist, and accumulated tech debt meant every change took months.

• Traffic falling and bounce rate climbing
• Churn high and still rising
• Several major SEO updates absorbed without response
• Reputation damage on Reddit, Quora and Twitter
• A 2014 interface, essentially untouched

The marketplace was charging the side that had no reason to stay.

MakersRow is two-sided: brands who need something made, and factories who want another sales channel. In 2021 prices rose on both sides at once. A brand posts a project, gets connected to a factory and is done, so there was no reason to keep paying $50–60 a month. The pricing model manufactured its own churn and suppressed the posted projects the factory side depended on.

Our first job was not design. It was consolidation: pull what each department knew into one knowledge base, and give the CEO a single account of the business.

Fix the economics first. Then the product.

We argued for minimal-to-no pricing for brands, keeping paid plans for genuinely exclusive options. Removing a revenue line in order to grow revenue was the hardest call to get agreed.

• Posting a project cut to two or three clicks, with signup moved to after the project exists
• Every factory that had left contacted with an offer and, more usefully, a conversation
• The 2014 interface rebuilt against focus groups, brands first and factories second
• One expensive factory plan split into three tiers, with a free trial and priority bidding
• The site turned into a knowledge source on how things get made

Build it before the meeting. Decide in the meeting. Ship after it.

A feature used to go from proposal to wireframe to design to meeting to development to meeting again. Two to three weeks was a fast cycle. We rebuilt the platform to be AI-first in how it is developed, with the design system embedded in the code. Changes that took two to three weeks now take a day at most.

Meetings now review working software instead of drawings of it. If a feature is agreed, it goes live straight after and we watch the result the same day. That made A/B testing routine and finally let sales and marketing move at their own speed. Two AI features also shipped into the product: AI photo generation for faster, better listings, and a chatbot that routes buyers to relevant factories.