At CustomMade, we are building a two-side marketplace that enables anyone to get virtually anything they can imagine, made exactly how they want, from the ideal “Maker”. Making this a reality poses some really fun (fun if you like making hard things simple) engineering challenges to tackle. This post describes some of these:
Knowledge Graph: CustomMade currently has over 100,000 135,000 listed projects representing creations by over 10,000 12,000 Makers. These projects can be virtually anything: from wooden bowties to R2D2 engagement rings. How do we build an underlying knowledge graph for 1:1 commerce that lets us—automatically: match customers and makers based on interest and style, automatically bid on the ideal AdWords for acquisition, detect unmet demand for new type of artisans, and much more? How do we codify personal things like style and skill? How do we make this extensible to anything product?
Search, Recommendation and Machine Learning: Creating custom items is deeply personal. Simply matching customers and artisans based on keyword and text relevance is not enough. How do we create matches that factor in personal taste, skill and style? How do we combine this with Search to provide results that only match relevance, style and taste, but also factor in real-time statistics on marketplace performance? How do we allow our platform to “learn” from user interaction (not just transactions but social sharing, page hold time and more)?
Simple Ideation Collaboration and Co-creation: Making it easy to “create anything you imagine” is very hard. What user interfaces (design and technology) make it easiest for customers to express ideas—while still conveying enough information to make it easy for Makers to understand what they need? How do you enable customers and makers to answers questions and collaborate on ideas—with the same intimacy of texting—across thousands of miles?
Cross-Platform Front End Engineering (Web, Mobile Web, Native Mobile): How do you build experiences that cater to the different capabilities of web (where typing is easy and screens are big), smart phone (where time is short and typing is hard but taking a photo or audio note is easy) and tablets (where browsing and exploration in front of the TV is common)? What combinations of Native Mobile and HTML5 technologies provide the ideal balance of speed of development, fast iteration, and fast user experience?
Payments: Secure payment processing is the hallmark of any marketplace. Not only are we tackling the standard challenges of transactional integrity and security; we are also creating payment models unique for a two-sided custom marketplace? How do you structure payment processing to buy items that do not even exist yet? How do you do this in a manner that provides Trust & Safety guarantees to both customer “Buyers” and artisan “Makers”? How do make this clear, simple, secure and scalable—across currencies and international borders?
Continuous, Linear Scaling: This year all aspects of our platform are growing. As we build for 100x scaling, how do we modify our platform architecture to enable us to continuously scale while providing a faster and faster experience for our customers? What caching approaches best balance speed with the dynamic nature of our user-generated content? Which sharding strategies best match our usage patterns? How do we implement these without interrupting users (what we call “changing out parts of the rocket mid-flight”)?
Right now is a really great time to join CustomMade. We’re big enough to have lots of traffic and rapidly see new ideas translate into conversation rates and revenue. However, we are still small enough to innovate quickly. We are seeking talented engineers to join us on this journey. If you’re interested, check out our job openings in the Boston and London metro areas.
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