Building Professional Profiles for a Local Services Marketplace

easyLife — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:02:34 +0000

Finding a good local professional sounds simple.

You need a photographer, electrician, carpenter, plumber, designer, cleaner, or some other specialist. You search online, look at a few profiles, compare options, and contact someone.

But from the other side, things are very different.

For an independent professional, getting discovered by the right customer can be one of the hardest parts of running a service business.

A photographer may have years of experience and hundreds of great photographs, but if potential customers cannot discover them, that experience doesn't translate into new business.

This is one of the problems we're trying to understand while building easyLife, a local services marketplace.

easyLife marketplace

The problem with finding local professionals

There are already many ways to find service professionals.

People use:

Google
Instagram
Facebook
WhatsApp
Personal referrals
Local communities
Classified platforms
Specialized marketplaces

But information is often scattered.

For example, imagine someone looking for a photographer in Jaipur.

They might find one photographer on Instagram, another through a friend's recommendation, another on Google, and another through a wedding planner.

Then they have to manually compare:

Portfolio
Experience
Location
Services
Pricing
Availability
Reviews
Contact information

There isn't always a simple way to compare professionals based on the things that actually matter.

That made us think about a different approach.

A professional should have more than a name and phone number

One of the first things we started thinking about was the professional profile.

A professional profile should act almost like a small digital storefront.

Instead of simply showing:

John Doe
Photographer
Phone: XXXXX

we want the profile to communicate much more.

For example:

Professional information
Name
Profession
Location
Years of experience
Areas served
Languages spoken
Services

A photographer might offer:

Wedding photography
Pre-wedding photography
Event photography
Portrait photography
Product photography
Corporate photography
Portfolio

This is particularly important for visual professions.

A customer should be able to see the professional's actual work before making a decision.

Pricing

Where possible, customers should have some idea of the starting price.

It doesn't necessarily need to be a fixed price.

It could be:

Starting from ₹5,000

or:

Contact professional for a custom quote.

Availability

Another important piece of information is whether the professional is actually available.

There is little value in finding the perfect photographer if they're already booked for your date.

Why we're starting with photographers

For easyLife, we're initially exploring photographers in Jaipur.

There is a simple reason for this.

Photography is highly visual.

A photographer's work can often communicate their capabilities better than a paragraph of text.

A customer can look at a portfolio and immediately understand:

"This is the type of photography I want."

It also gives us an opportunity to experiment with how professional profiles should work.

If we can build a useful profile experience for photographers, many of the same principles can eventually apply to other categories.

For example:

Photographer

Portfolio → Photography services → Experience → Location → Pricing → Availability

Electrician

Services → Experience → Service areas → Starting price → Availability → Reviews

Carpenter

Services → Previous work → Experience → Location → Pricing → Availability

The underlying marketplace structure can remain similar while the profile adapts to each profession.

The two-sided marketplace problem

There is another interesting challenge.

A local services marketplace has two sides:

Customers ↔ Professionals

Customers want choices.

Professionals want customers.

But neither side gets much value if the other side isn't there.

If we have 1,000 customers but only three photographers, customers won't find enough options.

If we have 1,000 photographers but no customers, professionals won't have a reason to stay.

This creates the classic chicken-and-egg problem of marketplaces.

That's why we're not trying to launch every category in every city simultaneously.

We're starting small.

One city.

A few categories.

Then learning from actual users.

Starting with Jaipur

Jaipur is our first focus.

Instead of saying:

"Let's build a marketplace for all of India."

we're asking a much smaller question:

Can we make it easier for customers in Jaipur to discover local professionals?

That changes how we approach the product.

We can talk directly to professionals.

We can understand how they currently find customers.

We can talk to customers about how they search for services.

And we can improve the product based on what we learn.

What we are learning from professionals

Before building too many features, we want to understand how independent professionals actually work.

For photographers, we're particularly interested in questions such as:

Where do your customers come from?
How important is Instagram?
How many customers come through referrals?
Do you use Google to generate leads?
Do wedding planners generate business for you?
Do you run paid advertisements?
What percentage of enquiries become paying customers?
What is the biggest problem with getting new customers?
Would a professional marketplace be useful?
What would make you trust and actively use such a platform?

These questions are more important than simply adding another feature to the application.

Because a marketplace should solve a real problem.

Building for the professional, not just the customer

A common mistake when building a marketplace is to focus entirely on the customer experience.

Search.

Filter.

Book.

Pay.

Done.

But the professional experience is equally important.

If professionals don't receive value from the platform, they won't maintain their profiles.

And without good professional profiles, customers don't get a good marketplace experience.

That's why we're thinking about easyLife as two connected products:

Customer experience

Discover → Compare → Contact → Book → Review

Professional experience

Both sides need to work.

A profile is only the beginning

A professional profile by itself doesn't solve the marketplace problem.

Discovery is equally important.

A photographer might have an excellent profile, but if nobody sees it, nothing happens.

That's where search, location, categories, recommendations and content become important.

Eventually, we want a customer searching for something like:

photographer in Jaipur

to be able to discover relevant professionals based on useful information rather than simply seeing a random list of names.

The same idea can apply to:

wedding photographer in Jaipur

birthday photographer in Jaipur

product photographer in Jaipur

event photographer in Jaipur

And eventually thousands of other local service searches.

Why local search matters

Local services are different from many online products.

If someone needs a photographer for an event tomorrow, they probably don't care about a photographer who is 1,000 kilometres away.

Location matters.

Availability matters.

Service type matters.

Price matters.

Reviews matter.

Experience matters.

That's why we're designing the marketplace around local discovery rather than treating every professional as a generic listing.

Building one category at a time

We're still early.

There are many things we don't know yet.

That's actually the interesting part.

Instead of assuming that customers want a particular feature, we're trying to validate the problem first.

Instead of onboarding thousands of professionals immediately, we're starting with a smaller group.

Instead of launching everywhere, we're starting with Jaipur.

And instead of trying to solve every service category at once, we're beginning with photographers and learning from the process.

What happens next?

The next step is simple:

Talk to professionals.

We want to understand how photographers currently acquire customers, what works, what doesn't, and what they would actually want from a marketplace.

Then we'll use those insights to improve the product.

The goal isn't to build another directory containing thousands of names.

The goal is to build a platform where a customer can discover a professional, understand what they offer, evaluate their work, and confidently decide whether they're the right person for the job.

That's the direction we're exploring with easyLife.

And we're starting in Jaipur.

If you're a photographer in Jaipur

I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

Where do your customers actually come from today?

Instagram?
Google?
Referrals?
Wedding planners?
Your personal network?
Paid advertising?
Something else?

And more importantly:

What's the hardest part of getting your next customer?

We're building easyLife one category and one city at a time.

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DEV Community: easyLife

Building Professional Profiles for a Local Services Marketplace