ZBRITJE means "Discounts" in Albanian. It was a nationwide marketplace putting local businesses in front of people looking to spend less, across all of Kosovo.
Marketplaces have one honest problem and a lot of dishonest answers to it. The problem is that both sides are empty on day one. The dishonest answer is a growth strategy deck. The honest answer is that somebody has to go out and get the first two thousand merchants by hand.
That was my job. I built the business development playbook and then ran it myself: who to approach, what to say in the first thirty seconds, what to offer a shop owner who has never posted anything online and does not want to start today. 2,500+ businesses signed up. Retail, restaurants, services, travel.
Talking to that many owners teaches you what the product has to be. They do not want a dashboard with twelve tabs. They want to post an offer in two minutes, see whether anyone cared, and get on with running the shop. So the merchant side stayed narrow on purpose: create an offer, manage it, see what happened.
The shopper side had the opposite job. People do not arrive knowing what they want. They browse. So we built for browsing: categories, search, and a mobile flow that worked on the phone people actually held, which in Kosovo at the time was not a new one.
I sat between both sides. Product decisions on the interface and the dashboard. Business decisions on pricing, onboarding, and the support process. The processes mattered as much as the software. A small team can serve thousands of partners, but only if signing up a merchant does not require a meeting.