The Marketplace Was a Sentence. Now It Is a Storefront.
The homepage used to describe a creator marketplace that did not actually exist yet. This week it became real. Building it surfaced a bug that would have quietly rejected every audio-only submission.
For months, the homepage said a community marketplace existed. It did not. It was a paragraph. A promise, dressed up as a feature.
This week it became real.
What a storefront actually is
Real listings, pulled from a real database. Creator name, category, price. Not placeholders. Not "coming soon" cards designed to look busy.
Today that query returns zero. Nobody has been certified yet.
We could have hidden that. Filled the grid with sample cards. Made it look alive before it was.
We didn't. The homepage says "0 courses certified so far" in plain text. An empty shelf is more honest than a fake one.
The bug that would have shut people out
Every submission to the marketplace runs through an automated audit. Structure. Accessibility. Content safety. One of the accessibility rules checked for embedded captions on the media file.
On any media file. Including audio.
No video track. Nothing to caption. Automatic fail. Every time.
Think about who that quietly excludes. Someone managing pain who can talk through a lesson but can't sit upright for a camera. Someone whose hands don't cooperate with a keyboard but whose voice still works fine. A podcast-shaped course instead of a video-shaped one.
The rule wasn't malicious. It was just written for one kind of creator and applied to all of them.
Audio doesn't need captions. It needs a transcript, which the pipeline already asks for separately. So the fix was simple once we saw it: captions are required for video, not for audio. We wrote a test for it so it stays fixed.
The rest of it
The homepage also got a real redesign. Lilac, cream, a softer type. Actual course titles instead of four pathway names in a row.
Dark mode stayed dark on purpose. A bright page might read as "on brand." It would also be actively unkind to anyone whose condition includes light sensitivity, and that is a real slice of the people this platform is built for. The accent color survives the toggle. The brightness does not have to.
We also cleared out nineteen documents describing pricing models we no longer use. Some of them said, in writing, "do not reopen this decision." We reopened it twice since. Old plans left lying around stop being history and start being misinformation.
Who this is for
The marketplace exists so patients, clinicians, and advocates can teach the specific thing they know that we will never get around to building ourselves. That only works if the door is actually open to them, not open in a sentence on a homepage.
What would you build, if the format didn't have to be video?