Northlane
A marketplace for specialist contractors.
A two-sided marketplace where the real product was trust: verified people, scoped quotes, held money and a dispute path people actually use.
- 31%
- Quote to booking
- $4.2M
- Payouts processed
- Under 1%
- Disputes escalated
How it started
It began as a conversation, not a brief.
Two founders with a sketch and a strong opinion about a trade they knew well. The first conversations were not about software at all — they were about who pays when a job goes wrong. We worked the pricing, the matching and the review rules as product questions first. Three years on, the same two founders still run it.
What we did
- Product model
- Marketplace economics
- UX research
- Production engineering
Product decisions
What to build, and just as importantly what to leave out.
Two sides, one trust problem. Verified profiles, scoped quotes, escrowed payments and a dispute path that people actually use.
Quotes with a scope, not a number
A quote states what is included and what is not, so both sides agree before money moves. It removed most of the disputes before they could happen.
Money held until the work is done
Payment is taken up front and released on completion. Contractors stop chasing invoices and clients stop worrying, which is what made the second side of the marketplace grow.
A dispute path people are willing to use
Short, human and visible from the booking itself. Because it is not hidden, most cases settle between the two parties before anyone escalates.
How it is built
The part nobody sees, which is the part that has to hold.
The same engineers who designed this still run it. Here is how it is put together and why we made those calls.
Row-level rules, not interface rules
Who can see a booking, a quote or a payout is decided in the database. A client and a contractor on the same job see only their own side of it.
Payments as a state machine
Hold, release, refund and dispute are explicit states with allowed transitions. Nothing can be released twice, and every change is recorded with who caused it.
Verification before listing
Identity and trade credentials are checked before a profile can take work, and re-checked on expiry. The trust the marketplace runs on is enforced, not assumed.
- Access control
- Row-level rules per party, per job
- Money
- Explicit states, no double release
- Verification
- Checked on join and on expiry
- Support
- Run and maintained by us
Where it is now
What it does for the people using it.
- Just under a third of quotes turn into a booking.
- More than $4.2M paid out to contractors through the platform.
- Fewer than one percent of jobs are ever escalated.
Building something like this?
Bring us the idea, or bring us what you already have.
We can build it with you from nothing, or look at what exists today and tell you what to fix, what to build next and what to leave out.