Across the last few home-services marketplace builds I've been part of (cleaning, repairs, salon-at-home type booking flows), the same three things kept eating more time than expected, in this order:
Provider trust/verification document checks, ratings, and dispute handling needed to be right from day one. Bolting it on after a few bad-actor incidents was way more expensive than building it in up front.
Payment splits and payout timing getting the wallet logic right between customer and provider (holds, refunds, payout schedule) caused more support tickets early on than any missing feature did.
Scheduling conflicts double-bookings and no-shows quietly killed early retention more than discovery or search ever did.
What surprised me is that none of these three were the thing founders originally worried about most going in most people spend their early planning time on discovery/search UX, and the actual pain shows up somewhere else entirely once real bookings start happening.
Curious if others building in this space saw the same pattern, or if something else entirely turned out to be the real bottleneck for you onboarding the supply side, pricing/commission structure, something else?
