Designing for the online marketplace ecosystem: From Aalto University to €2.5M ARR

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"Janne is an outstanding designer and team member. He has a unique skill set of combining world class UI & UX design skills and the ability to turn his pixel-perfect designs into production-ready code."

Juho Makkonen

Founder & CEO, Sharetribe

Summary

Client

Sharetribe

Helsinki, Finland

My role

Lead Designer

Tech stack

React

CSS Modules

Gatsby

Clojure

Challenge

Transforming a niche university project into a world-class, category-leading SaaS platform. The core difficulty lay in productizing a complex marketplace engine while scaling the design system and brand through a decade of rapid growth and shifting market demands.

Outcome

Successful transition from a 0-to-1 startup to a mature, profitable business generating €2.5M in ARR. I delivered the end-to-end design for the marketplace templates, the Console admin panel, and the Pages no-code CMS, all supported by a production-ready design architecture that empowers thousands of founders globally.

Visit

sharetribe.com

Defining and evolving an online marketplace ecosystem as the company's first designer

I joined Sharetribe as the first designer in the company, taking on the responsibility of establishing the product's fundamental visual and functional language. At that stage, the challenge was defining a user experience for a product that didn't yet have a clear category. My journey as the foundational designer taught me that a perfect design file is only 50% of the work; the other 50%—the feeling and the inevitable magic—is often lost during the handoff if the designer isn't present in the code.

Bridging the gap to protect the 10% vision

I didn't become a full-stack designer out of frustration, but out of a passion for shipping excellence. I saw that under time pressure, even modern product teams fall back on a broken, siloed handoff model that forces compromises. To ensure our brand craft was shipped without compromise, I began taking full ownership of our marketing sites—designing and coding them myself. This 10-year journey as the lead design voice taught me how to speak both languages fluently and led to the creation of the J&CO process.

Architecting the Marketplace Templates and the Console

A primary focus of my role was leading the design and UI/UX of Sharetribe's marketplace templates. I didn't just provide mockups; I worked closely with developers to decide which features would be implemented and how they would behave. I often jumped into the code myself to polish pixels and thoroughly test every state to ensure the product felt right. This same approach applied to Console, Sharetribe's admin panel for marketplace operators, where I partnered deep with the engineering team to ensure the inevitable magic was preserved in production.

Productizing the content experience with Pages

I spearheaded the conceptualization and design of Pages, Sharetribe's no-code CMS. By transforming a complex technical requirement into an intuitive editor, we allowed non-technical marketplace founders to build custom pages independently. This drastically reduced their reliance on engineering support and accelerated their time-to-market.

Scaling a systemic architecture for a global audience

As the company grew from a first-hire startup to a category leader, early move fast hacks became design debt. I led the transition to a systemic design approach, ensuring that our component library was not just a collection of assets, but a production-ready system integrated directly into the code. By maintaining a full-stack design mindset over ten years, I ensured that every feature—from complex marketplace settings to user dashboards—remained coherent and performant as the user base expanded globally.

After a decade of defining the Sharetribe ecosystem, I stepped away in the spring of 2024 to establish J&CO. This transition marks a shift from building a single category leader to helping a selective group of founders apply these same principles of Unitary Design and Systemic Craft to their own visions. I am immensely grateful for that 10-year journey and for the brilliant colleagues who taught me what it means to build and scale world-class software.