Reactivating a two-sided marketplace
Osdire
Osdire is a freelance marketplace connecting buyers with skilled freelancers. I designed an end-to-end experience covering project drafting, registration, custom offers, credit top-ups, negotiation and purchase.
Journey mapping | User Flows | Interaction Design | UI Design | Prototyping | Product Specifications and Handoff
Marketplace
Product Designer
Project Manager, Backend Lead, Engineering and QA
Background
Osdire initially focused on building its freelancer supply before onboarding buyers. By the time buyer acquisition began, however, many early freelancers had become inactive.
This created a marketplace-liquidity problem. Buyers risked receiving few or slow responses, weakening trust before they experienced the platform’s value. Freelancers, meanwhile, needed credible opportunities that were easy to evaluate and worth responding to.
23%
Weekly sign-up
28%
Messaging
37%
User Engagement
The Challenge
The project-posting experience could not solve freelancer inactivity by itself, but it could reduce friction between buyer demand and freelancer supply.
Many buyers knew the outcome they wanted but struggled to turn it into a clear brief. Starting from a blank form required considerable effort, while vague requirements made it harder for freelancers to judge fit, estimate the work or submit an appropriate offer.
In a marketplace already affected by inactivity, every additional barrier increased the risk of buyers receiving no meaningful response.
I therefore needed to:
Help buyers create clear, publishable projects with less effort
Make opportunities easier for freelancers to assess and respond to
Re-engage freelancers through meaningful marketplace activity
Support negotiation without making decision-making overwhelming
Connect the experience to credits, payment and order creation
Defining success
I focused on meaningful interactions rather than surface-level activity such as logins or page views.
North Star: Weekly Engaged Freelancers
The number of unique freelancers who submit a custom offer or actively participate in a buyer negotiation during the week.
This indicates whether buyer demand is successfully generating meaningful activity from the freelancer side of the marketplace.
I paired it with two business outcomes:
Project response rate: percentage of published projects receiving at least one relevant offer within 48 hours
Project-to-purchase conversion: percentage of published projects resulting in a completed purchase
Supporting metrics followed the critical journey:
Draft and registration
Draft completion, draft-to-sign-up conversion, sign-up abandonment, sign-up-to-publication
Freelancer Response
Project-view-to-offer conversion, time to first relevant offer, projects receiving no offers
Credit Topup
Top-up completion, top-up abandonment, top-up-to-offer conversion
Negotiation
Offer-to-negotiation conversion, response rate, negotiation-to-purchase conversion
Purchase
Checkout completion, project-to-purchase conversion, time from publication to purchase
I would also monitor irrelevant offers, abandoned projects, payment failures, disputes and cancellations to ensure that increased activity did not reduce marketplace quality.
Mapping the Wider System
I worked with the Project Manager and Backend Lead to map how buyer and freelancer actions affected each other across the platform.
Buyer: Draft project → Register → Publish → Receive offers → Negotiate → Accept → Pay
Freelancer: Discover project → Assess fit → Purchase credits if needed → Send custom offer → Negotiate → Receive order
This exposed dependencies that were easy to miss when looking only at the project-posting form. Project information had to support discovery, filtering, offer creation, negotiation, payment and order states.
These discussions also helped us define when an editable offer became a committed order and what each side should see as the transaction progressed.
User flow and discussion board:
Key design decisions
Reducing the effort of starting
The experience begins with a simple question: “What do you need to get done?”
Buyers can describe their goal briefly and either generate a starting brief using AI or write it themselves. The generated content remains editable, making AI a starting point rather than an automated decision-maker.
Turning an idea into structured opportunities
I organised the brief around three questions:
What needs to be done?
What are the budget, timeframe and deliverables?
What skills or experience should the freelancer have?
Predefined budget ranges, skills and deliverables created consistent data for matching and filtering. Contextual guidance helped buyers provide useful detail without overwhelming them with instructions upfront.
Delaying the sign-up wall
Instead of requiring registration before buyers could begin, I placed the sign-up wall after the project-drafting experience.
This allowed visitors to first see their idea develop into a credible project and understand the value of reaching suitable talent. Registration then became the next step required to publish, rather than an interruption before value had been demonstrated.
The primary measure for this decision would be visitor-to-published-project conversion, supported by draft-to-sign-up and sign-up-to-publication rates.
Connecting custom offers to credits
Freelancers could review a project and create a tailored offer containing their proposed scope, price, delivery timeframe and message.
If they lacked sufficient credits, they could top up before submitting. I treated top-up completion as an intermediate metric—not an outcome in itself. The experience would only be successful if purchased credits resulted in more relevant offers and eventual transactions.
Supporting negotiation before commitment
Buyers and freelancers could clarify scope and revise terms before an offer became an order. This reflected the reality that project requirements and pricing are not always final at the first exchange.
Clear offer, negotiation, payment and order states reduced uncertainty for users while giving Engineering a more consistent transaction model.
Testing a negotiation limit
I also designed the number of simultaneous buyer negotiations as a testable product decision.
Hypothesis: limiting active negotiations could reduce choice overload, encourage buyers to focus on their strongest candidates and shorten the path to purchase.
However, an overly restrictive limit might reduce buyer confidence by preventing useful comparison.
I would compare capped and uncapped experiences using:
Negotiation-to-purchase conversion
Time from first negotiation to purchase
Abandonment after reaching the limit
Average negotiations before purchase
Buyer satisfaction and perceived freedom of choice
Results would be segmented by the number of offers received, project value and whether the buyer was new or returning.
Outcome
The final design connected project drafting, delayed registration, structured publishing, freelancer discovery, custom offers, credit purchasing, negotiation and payment in one developer-ready journey.
Rather than treating project posting as an isolated form, I designed it as the starting point of a marketplace interaction. The solution aimed to make buyer demand easier to act on, create more meaningful reasons for freelancers to return and increase the likelihood that published projects progressed to purchase.
Reflection
This project changed how I thought about engagement in a two-sided marketplace. Success was not simply getting more buyers to publish or more freelancers to log in. It was creating enough relevant interaction for both sides to experience value.
It also reinforced the importance of defining metrics before evaluating individual screens. Every design decision—from delaying registration to structuring briefs and limiting negotiations—could then be connected to a clear behavioural hypothesis and measurable business outcome.
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