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    PROJECT_02FintechMarketplacesMVP testing

    A way to sell startup shares before an exit

    Project
    Secondary Market at Seedrs, now Republic Europe
    My contribution
    As product manager: the definition process, the internal test, prototypes and specification.
    Team delivery
    A beta market that opened in June 2017. The rules came out of team discussions; leadership handled the conversations with the FCA.
    Transcript
    Problem
    Investors who backed a startup on Seedrs usually couldn't sell until an IPO or a sale, which could take years. They were already posting offers on company pages, so the open question was how trading would work in practice.
    Solution
    As product manager, Leonardo ran the definition process and started with a test inside the company. Employees asked to buy or sell shares on a Google Form, and the team matched them and moved the shares by hand. After adjusting the process, the team defined the beta: one week a month, a set price, existing shareholders only, and a £1,000 cap.
    Impact
    In June 2017, the first window listed over 138 share lots, and more than 54 sold. A year later, with the market open to all investors, a single cycle traded 601 lots.
    Value
    Investors gained a way to sell before an exit, and companies stayed out of the paperwork. A process tested by hand, then built into a product.
    From a form to a market01 / 03

    Employees asked to buy or sell a number of shares. We matched them and moved the shares by hand.

    Internal testGoogle Forms · manual transfers

    Test Run the operation by hand before building it.

    Simplified illustration, not the production interface. Names and quantities are illustrative.

    Investors who backed a startup through Seedrs usually stayed in that investment until an IPO or a sale, which could take years. A company could grow a lot on paper and they would still have no way to sell. Seedrs now trades as Republic Europe.

    I was the product manager on the Secondary Market, the product that let those investors trade with each other before an exit. I ran the process of defining it, built the first test, and took it through prototypes and specification with the engineering team. The market opened in beta in June 2017.

    Demand was not the hard question

    We already had many signs that people wanted this. Investors were posting offers to buy and sell on the pages of companies they had backed, and Seedrs said it had completed 213 secondary transactions, worth £728,000, before the market existed.

    The harder question was how the process would work in practice. Someone had to find a buyer for each seller and move the shares between them, and we needed to learn what that took before building it.

    A Google Form and manual transfers

    We started inside the company, with employees. A Google Form let people ask to buy or sell a certain number of shares. We read the answers, worked out who could trade with whom, and made each transfer by hand.

    That form gave us a way to check people's appetite and, more usefully, to run the operation for real.

    The test raised several operational problems that we had to solve to make it work. Once the internal rounds were working, we adjusted the whole process, and only then built the product.

    Turning the test into rules

    The rules of the beta came out of many meetings about the pros and cons of each option. The result was a deliberately narrow market:

    • A trading window. The market opened for one week a month, starting on the first Tuesday. A set period makes people focus and act: what is available now may be gone soon after. Closing the window also leaves time to complete every transfer.
    • No continuous trading yet. We set it aside for the first phase to keep the operation simple. Everything was still experimental and volume was low at the start, so one week a month was enough.
    • A set price. Shares traded at the fair value given by the Seedrs valuation policy. Jeff Lynn, then CEO, explained that a market price too low or too high could complicate a company's next funding round.
    • Limited trades. Only existing shareholders could buy or sell, with a cap of £1,000.

    The market also relied on something Seedrs already had. Seedrs holds shares as nominee on investors' behalf, so a trade changes the beneficial owner without involving the company.

    My part was the definition process, the prototypes, the specification and the work with engineering. Conversations with the FCA, the UK regulator, were handled by the leadership team.

    The first window

    The first window opened on 6 June 2017. It listed over 138 share lots across more than 80 eligible companies, and more than 54 lots had sold by the close. More than 275 requests to sell were already in for July.

    Opening the market

    Who should be able to buy was an ongoing discussion across the team. In February 2018 the market opened to every investor on the platform, and that window traded 442 lots in 128 businesses.

    By the June 2018 cycle, trading had reached 601 lots, a 918% increase on the first cycle. Seedrs reported 2,990 investor exits in the first year, with total trades just under £1 million.

    I left Seedrs in November 2018. The market kept changing after that, with variable pricing and access for any private company in 2020, and 24/7 access in 2025.

    What I took from it

    Running the process by hand before writing code showed us the operational work behind a trade, which demand signals could not show. A form was enough to start learning that.

    It also changed how I think about constraints. The window, the set price and the cap suited a market that was still small and experimental, and several of them changed once it had volume to support something else.