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Investing in a marketplace?
Talk to the team behind the Scale Cube.
Diligence for platforms where scale is the business model
Diligence of marketplaces, consumer apps, and high-traffic platforms.
Marketplaces and consumer platforms grow through volume: more buyers, sellers, users, and transactions. AKF’s founders led technology at eBay, one of the largest marketplaces on the internet, and the AKF Scale Cube came from that work. We assess whether the platform can handle the next order of magnitude in traffic and transactions, and whether trust and safety keep up.
What we find most often
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Scaling limits in the core database.
A single primary database carrying search, transactions, and messaging. We use the AKF Scale Cube to lay out the path: replicate reads (X-axis), split search, checkout, and messaging into separate services (Y-axis), and shard users or regions (Z-axis), with a cost and sequence for each step.
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Peak-traffic fragility.
Systems that hold under average load but fail at seasonal or promotional peaks. We test headroom against AKF’s design 20x, implement 3x, deploy 1.5x rule.
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Trust and safety gaps.
Fraud, fake listings, and abuse handled manually, with costs rising alongside volume.
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Payments and payouts.
Weak reconciliation between what buyers pay and what sellers receive.
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Growth-team tech debt.
Years of experiments left in the codebase, slowing every release.