Start a Vetted Marketplace for AI Automation Builders

1. 1

   Make vetting real, not a badge

   A practical assessment (build and document a small automation against a spec), a review of two live client systems, reference calls, and a reliability interview about error handling and maintenance. Publish your vetting bar and your rejection rate. The bar is the brand; the day you loosen it for supply growth is the day you become the platforms you are replacing.

2. 2

   Standardize the scope before the match

   Most automation disasters are scoping failures. Build intake templates per job type (lead routing, document processing, support triage, reporting) that force the buyer to define systems touched, volumes, failure tolerance, and who maintains it after handoff. A well-scoped brief makes mediocre builders good and good builders fast.

3. 3

   Run money through milestone escrow

   Deposit into escrow, milestones released on acceptance criteria written into the scope, and a dispute process a human actually staffs. Escrow is what lets a small business trust a stranger with its operations stack, and disputes handled fairly in year one are marketing for the next five.

4. 4

   Own outcomes past the handoff

   Automations rot: APIs change, volumes spike, edge cases arrive. Require a thirty-day warranty in every engagement and offer buyers an optional maintenance plan fulfilled by the original builder. Month-three reliability is your review metric, and it is the number that separates you from generic platforms.

5. 5

   Seed both sides deliberately

   Recruit the first twenty builders personally from communities where good ones hang out, and land buyer demand through content that names the lemon-market problem honestly (what a fake automation agency looks like, what real scoping looks like). Concierge-match the first fifty projects yourself; you are the algorithm until the data exists.

6. 6

   Charge like an outcome business

   A marketplace percentage on escrowed projects plus a share of maintenance plans. Resist listing fees and pay-to-rank placements forever; the moment ranking is buyable, your vetting story collapses and the lemons win again.

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