If you're building any kind of two-sided platform, one of the first decisions you face is how much to get involved in the transaction.
Do you step back and let supply and demand sort itself out? Or do you get hands-on and make the matches yourself?
We've been grappling with this question at Rendered. And the answer we've landed on has shaped almost everything about how we're building.
The appeal of pure marketplaces
On paper, a marketplace model is seductive. It's how Fiverr and Upwork work—clients post projects, freelancers bid, the market clears. Only minimal intervention from the platform is required.
The economics are attractive too. Less operational overhead means better margins. You don't need to develop expertise in matching; you just need to get enough buyers and sellers in one place, and the market does the work.
For a two-person team building part-time, that sounds appealing.
But the more we talked to professionals signing up to Rendered, the clearer the problems became.
The race to the bottom
Open bidding pushes prices down. That's the point—it's supposed to be efficient. But efficiency in this context often means a race to whoever will accept the lowest rate.
One person we spoke to had tried a marketplace platform and hated it. The whole experience felt transactional. She'd lowered her rates to compete, then resented the work when she got it.
That dynamic is particularly problematic for what we're trying to build. Our whole premise is that professionals accept reduced rates in exchange for meaningful work—not that they get squeezed into the lowest rate they'll tolerate.
Finding work is already exhausting
Several people told us the thing they dread most about freelancing is the constant hunt for clients. The pitching. The proposals that go nowhere. The emotional toll of putting yourself forward repeatedly and hearing nothing back.
That's not what we want Rendered to feel like.
Many of the people signing up are between jobs, or returning after career breaks, or trying to fit meaningful work around other commitments. They're already navigating uncertainty. The last thing they need is another environment where they constantly have to sell themselves.
Nonprofits need to trust what they're getting
On the demand side, charities often don't have the time or expertise to sift through dozens of proposals and work out who's actually good.
They're not procurement specialists. They're programme managers and executive directors and fundraisers who also happen to need a website redesign or a strategy document or help with their CRM. They don't want to evaluate fifty applicants. They want confidence that whoever they work with can deliver.
A marketplace puts that burden on them. A matching service takes it on.
What we're building instead
That's why we've designed Rendered as a talent matching service rather than an open marketplace.
We get to know the professionals on our platform—their skills, their experience, what motivates them, what kind of work they're looking for. When a nonprofit comes to us with a need, we make recommendations. They still get a choice, but from a curated shortlist rather than an open field.
This is more hands-on for us. It means we need to develop good judgment about what works—which combinations of skills and experience and temperament lead to successful engagements, and which don't.
We're trying to build that judgment deliberately:
Staying focused. We're not trying to match every possible skill with every possible need. We're starting with areas where we can build genuine expertise—strategy, technology, marketing, design, operations—and going deep rather than wide.
Tight feedback loops. Every engagement teaches us something. We're building systems to capture what worked and what didn't, so our matching gets better over time.
Being honest about confidence. Not every match will be perfect. When we're less certain, we'll say so. Nonprofits deserve to know whether we're highly confident in a recommendation or taking a reasonable bet.
The trade-off
We're not pretending this approach doesn't have costs.
It's less scalable, at least initially. Each match requires attention. We have to actually think about whether two people will work well together. Growth will be slower and more deliberate.
It's also riskier. If we make a bad introduction, we'll take responsibility as we recommended them.
But we think this approach better serves the kind of professionals and nonprofits we want to work with. People who want meaningful work without having to constantly pitch for it, and nonprofits who'd rather have a few good recommendations than a hundred applicants to sort through.
If that sounds like the right approach to you—whether you're a professional looking for meaningful work or a nonprofit that needs help—we'd love to hear from you.
Interested in what we're building?
Rendered connects skilled professionals with nonprofits for meaningful, paid project work.