For CPG founders building from scratch
One account manager runs your marketplace operation, Amazon, Walmart, or TikTok Shop, backed by specialists in listings, pricing, advertising, and operations. No salaries. No benefits. No 401k. No risk of a bad hire. Just the expertise, plugged directly into your business.
When capital is scarce, every hire is a bet you cannot afford to get wrong. Most brands either try to cover every marketplace function in-house, and the founder becomes the bottleneck, or hire one generalist freelancer per gap as it appears, and end up with several disconnected vendors who never coordinate with each other. Few ever get a clear-eyed map of which specific function, listings, pricing, advertising, or operations, is actually costing them the most growth right now, versus which ones are genuinely fine to leave alone.
Here is what plugging in actually looks like.
Why founders choose to plug in
When capital is scarce, a bad hire does not just cost a salary. It costs the 401k match, the health insurance, the payroll taxes, the weeks of onboarding nobody bills you for, and the months you spend managing someone before you know if it is working. A fractional expert team removes that bet.
How it works
Tell us what you sell, where (Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, or not yet live), how your marketplace operation is currently staffed, and what feels hardest right now.
Across the four core functions a marketplace brand needs covered: Listings & Content, Pricing & Margin, Advertising, and Operations & Fulfillment, scoring each on how well it's currently covered and how much growth is sitting behind it.
A simple visual showing which functions are strong, which are exposed, and which one is the highest-leverage fix right now, ranked, not a vague "you should improve everything."
What a fractional specialist team would actually do for your top gap, and what to leave as-is for now.
For one brand we assessed (illustrative example), the instinct was to hire more ad management help because spend kept climbing with flat results. The coverage map showed the real leak was upstream: thin listing content and inconsistent pricing across pack sizes were suppressing conversion rate, so every ad dollar was buying clicks that couldn't close. The highest-leverage fix wasn't more ad spend, it was two weeks of listing and pricing work first.
What you get
A four-function coverage map (Listings & Content, Pricing & Margin, Advertising, Operations & Fulfillment), scored and ranked by growth impact, plus a plain-English readout of the single highest-leverage fix for your brand right now.
Before you apply
Your business name and website or Amazon storefront link; which marketplaces you currently sell on; how your marketplace operation is currently staffed; and what feels like the biggest bottleneck right now.
About 2 minutes to apply; if selected, one short call to review the coverage map together.
Honest things to know
If the map shows you're well covered everywhere, we'll tell you that.
A few honest sentences about where things feel hardest matter more than polished answers.
Whether you're not yet selling, a solo founder, or already running a small team, the question is always the same: where is a fractional expert the highest-leverage next addition.
$1,500 value. Free while applications are open. About 2 minutes to apply.
Find out where a fractional expert would move the needle first, before you spend scarce capital on your next hire.