Building a marketplace that works before it has enough listings.
Totterly is a marketplace where parents across Dubai, Sharjah, and Ajman buy, sell, and request children's essentials. The hardest problem was not the marketplace. It was what happens when someone searches and finds nothing.
02 / Marketplace
The client
Totterly is a community marketplace for children's items, operating across Dubai, Sharjah, and Ajman from DTEC in Dubai Silicon Oasis. Parents list what their children have outgrown, from books and toys to car seats, strollers, bikes, baby gear, shoes, and clothes, and find what they need from families nearby.
The challenge
Every marketplace has the same cold-start problem: it is only useful once it is full, but nobody stays long enough to fill it. UAE parents were already trading children's items in Facebook groups and general classifieds, where kids' items sit buried between used cars and old phones, listings are unsorted by age or area, and making contact means handing a stranger your phone number. A new marketplace that simply copied that model with a nicer interface would have failed the first time someone searched for a stroller and found four listings.
What we changed
We built the platform end to end, and designed around the empty-shelf problem rather than hoping to outrun it. Alongside normal listings, we built a request feature: a parent who cannot find what they need posts what they are looking for and their area, and gets notified when a nearby parent lists a match. That single decision means the product is useful on day one, when supply is thin, instead of only after it reaches critical mass. Browsing is organised by child age band and by emirate, so a parent sees what is actually relevant to them rather than everything.
How it works
Listings carry the details that decide a purchase between parents: condition, age suitability, area, and price. Conversation happens inside the platform, so phone numbers stay private by default and each parent chooses when to share contact details. Categories are deliberately narrow, covering the things families replace most often as children grow, rather than trying to be a general classifieds site with a children's section.
The outcome
Totterly launched as a working two-sided marketplace rather than an empty directory, with a mechanism that captures demand even when supply has not arrived yet. Every unfulfilled search becomes a signal the platform can act on, instead of a parent leaving and not returning. The owner runs it without managing listings and transactions by hand.
Technology
Full marketplace platform, user accounts and authentication, listing and request management, in-platform messaging with contact privacy, location and age-band filtering.
Scope Marketplace platform · Listings & requests · User accounts · In-platform chat · Local discovery
Live project
The site is in daily use by the business that owns it. Visit Totterly.
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