Co-founded Openfair: brand mark, product loop from search through Deal Finder matching, and $1M+ ARR in 12 months.

Project Summary

Openfair is a marketplace for buying and selling businesses in the United States and Canada. The platform has facilitated more than $500 million in business assets. I led product, UX, and brand from co-founding through scale: a mark that reads operator-grade in diligence rooms, and a product loop that puts structured financials on screen one.

Context and Problem

Small-business M&A discovery used to mean cold outreach and opaque financials. Operators compare dozens of assets. They need revenue, profit, and asking price before an LOI, not after a sales call. We built for that sequence: trust the numbers on screen one and two, then talk.

My Role

Co-founder and Product Lead. Owned product, UX, and brand mark, hired the first product and engineering teams, and delivered in vertical slices tied to buyer saved deals and seller published listings.

The Challenge

Marketplaces fail when discovery is noisy and diligence is thin. We had to earn trust in the UI and in the identity before the product demo started, then hit $1M ARR in twelve months without a payments roadmap on day one.

My Mandate

Shrink the time from "I am curious about ownership" to "I understand this asset." Ship discovery, diligence, and matching on web and mobile. Scale the team without making the founders the bottleneck.

Earn trust before the demo

We did not open with escrow or dispute flows. We opened with structured financials on every listing and a sober product surface that felt credible in diligence. Openfair serves buyers and sellers making major decisions. Marketplace brands often skew casual; we needed a mark that felt geometric, restrained, and operator-grade. Playful consumer fintech gloss would have broken trust before the first NDA. The wordmark had to hold on listing cards, seller marketing kits, and mobile splash screens. We designed the mark first, then extended it into navigation, listing cards, and seller-facing tools like Marketing Kit so deck, site, and product stayed aligned.

Brand in product

The mark extended from wordmark lockup into splash, search home, and listing marketing kit. Same tone across surfaces buyers see before diligence.

Build the product loop

Search and filters on web. Listing cards with revenue, profit, and price before the click. Detail pages with documents, seller context, and Marketing Kit so sellers could attach assets without a separate email thread. Deal Finder on mobile turned browsing into matching: swipe, save likes, return to a pipeline. Buyer profile setup captured industry and budget. Seller flows walked through business overview, expert profiles, and account-manager chat when a human was needed. Each release had to move a buyer closer to a saved deal or a seller closer to a published listing. If it did not connect to one of those loops, it waited.

Product in context

Three surfaces from the build: buyer matching, seller listing management, and mobile onboarding.

Scale what worked

We reached $1M+ ARR in twelve months. I hired and structured the first teams around search and listings, matching and notifications, and seller onboarding. What I would repeat: standardize financial fields early, design activation as a saved deal not a signup, and keep the brand promise visible in the UI. What I would sequence differently: pull seller listing setup earlier. Liquidity needs both sides visible in the product story from week one, even if one side is invite-only at launch.

Outcome

Buyers moved from discovery to saved deals with structured financials on every listing. Sellers published with marketing assets attached. Product, brand, and team scaled together through the first million in recurring revenue.

Closing Insight

We hit revenue when the second screen still showed numbers buyers could trust, not when we added another feature flag.