SkillBridge — Two-Sided Freelance Services Marketplace on Bubble

The challenge

The founder of SkillBridge had been running a manual matchmaking service for 18 months — connecting early-stage startups with fractional consultants (growth marketers, CFOs, product leads) over a private Slack community and Google Sheets. The model worked: he had 400 paying buyers and 300 consultants on his waitlist. But every transaction went through him personally. He was making introductions, negotiating rates, collecting payments via bank transfer, and chasing invoices by hand — a job that consumed 30+ hours a week and couldn't scale past a certain point.

He needed to productise it. A real platform where sellers could list their services, buyers could discover and book, and payments would split automatically between the consultant and the platform — without him in the middle of every deal. A custom React build was quoted at $180,000 and 9 months. He needed to launch within 3 months on a $40,000 budget, so Bubble was the right call.

What we built

We built SkillBridge on Bubble in 12 weeks — a fully two-sided marketplace with separate buyer and seller dashboards, Stripe Connect for automatic payment splitting, Algolia-powered search, and a complete admin panel for dispute resolution and fraud management. The data model was designed from the start to support the platform's 10% take rate with zero manual intervention on individual transactions.

• Dual-role user system with completely separate buyer and seller onboarding flows, profile types, and dashboards — including seller verification with document upload
• Stripe Connect with automatic split payments — platform collects 10% on every transaction, seller receives 90% direct to their connected bank account within 2 business days
• Algolia-powered search and discovery — sellers indexed by category, expertise tag, hourly rate, and average rating, with sub-100ms search response times
• In-app messaging thread between buyer and seller before and after booking — scoped to the engagement so conversation history persists
• Dispute resolution workflow with admin escalation — buyers can flag an engagement, admin reviews evidence from both sides, and refund/release is triggered from the admin panel

The results

SkillBridge launched with 620 pre-registered sellers from the founder's existing Slack waitlist. In the first 90 days, the platform processed $94,000 in GMV across 340 completed engagements — generating $9,400 in platform revenue with zero payment disputes and no manual transaction handling by the founder. The founder went from 30+ hours a week in manual matchmaking to checking a dashboard and writing product updates.

At the 6-month mark, SkillBridge crossed $200k in cumulative GMV and the founder raised a pre-seed round partly on the back of demonstrable platform metrics. He told us: "The first week it ran without me touching a single payment was when I actually believed we had a business."