A phased technical blueprint — click any phase or card to get full instructions, tools, and implementation steps.
Your only goal is a working artist profile with a booking button that actually sends an email. Don't build a marketplace — build a beautiful EPK page with a contact form. Get 3 paying artists before you add anything else.
The entire stack can be learned from YouTube tutorials + Claude. You don't need to understand everything deeply — you just need it to work.
Only build this after you have 3–5 paying artists. The premise: venues want to browse talent without cold-calling. You charge them $99–299/mo for browse access + booking request management.
This is where you add a second user role (venue) and a dashboard. It's the biggest feature jump — budget the most time here.
Now you have a working product with paying users on both sides. Phase 3 is about making it run without you — automations, referrals, and expanding the market model to new cities.
Target state: 5 hrs/week maintenance. You're doing growth and partnerships only. Everything operational is delegated or automated.
Marketplaces fail without liquidity — you need supply AND demand simultaneously, which is the classic chicken-and-egg problem. You solve this by starting with just supply (artists) and giving them a tool they'd pay for even if no venues were on the platform yet.
What to say to artists instead: "I'm building the best DJ profile and booking link in the industry — $20/month, looks way better than your current site, and you get a custom link you can send to venues." That's a no-brainer sell. Marketplace pitch is a much harder sell with nothing to show.
When to switch the pitch: Once you have 10+ artists and a few venues asking where they can browse talent. That's your green light to build the venue side.
The moment you start custom-building features for individual artists ("can you add my merch store?" / "can you change my layout to look like this?"), you've turned a SaaS into an agency. Your hours go up, your margins go down, and you can't scale.
The right answer to custom requests: "That's a great idea — I'll add it to the roadmap. If 3 more artists request it, I'll build it for everyone." This filters signal from noise AND gets you free product feedback.
Exception: One-time setup help for your first 3–5 artists is fine — you're doing white-glove onboarding to learn what's confusing. Just don't build anything custom that only one person will use.
Venues won't pay to browse an empty directory. If you build the venue side first and then try to recruit artists, you have nothing to show venues ("we have 2 profiles") and venues will leave before artists even show up.
Your sequence: Get 3 paying artists → charge a venue $0 to browse (free beta access) → get feedback → then charge venues once the product is validated from both sides.
How to get those 3 artists fast: You already know DJs in Aspen. Walk up to 5 of them, show them the profile page with their name on it (build it before you pitch), and ask if they'd pay $20/month for it. Don't ask hypothetically — show the thing. Conversion rate will be much higher.
The instinct when something is manual is to hire a developer to automate it. But dev time is expensive and slow. Before you write a line of code for an internal process, ask: can Zapier do this? Can a $15/hr VA do this 2 hrs/week?
What Zapier can handle for you: New booking request → send confirmation email + Slack DM to artist. New Stripe subscriber → create Supabase row + send welcome email. Subscription cancelled → tag user in email + trigger winback sequence.
When to actually hire: When a specific task takes more than 3 hrs/week consistently AND no tool can automate it AND it's blocking growth. Not before.