About The Market People

Our initial engagement with the industry as a market operator involved organising speciality markets as events. Each week, we hosted one or two markets of varying sizes, accommodating 30 to 150 traders, with approximately 70% hailing from overseas, spread across different locations in the UK.

Each market presented unique challenges, influenced by factors such as location, applicable legislation, and the interests of local stakeholders. Over the years, we have engaged with over 200 local authorities, navigating diverse administrative procedures and complying with various regulations. Acting as informal liaisons between traders and local authority services, including licensing, trading standards, environmental health, public safety, fire brigade, highway, public transport, police, park management, planning, and English heritage, among others, became part of our daily schedule.

The year 2009 marked a significant turning point for us. Like many businesses, we felt the impact of the economic downturn, which caused several long-term traders to leave, unable to weather the economic challenges. Subsequent local authorities’ budget cuts led to price hikes and service reductions. These circumstances heightened our administrative costs, which we could not transfer to struggling traders. We needed to streamline our administrative workload to ensure our survival.

A review of our administrative process revealed that we spent 20% of our time trying to connect with the correct department and 30% monitoring the trader’s operation and documentation in compliance with local authorities' requirements. Which was due to two factors:

The number of applications and traders’ details we had to process and provide to local authorities every week

The documentation required from one local authority to another needed to be more consistent, varying from very little to sometimes overly extensive. For example, providing the proof that a professional Gas Safety Check was conducted every time a gas bottle was reconnected.

We concluded that going digital was the only way to communicate the information to the traders and ensure they provided the correct documentation.

Six months later, we launched our inaugural website, enabling traders to submit applications to our markets online conveniently. It was a significant feat to achieve this milestone within a 26K budget. The streamlined process facilitated easy documentation verification, leading to a notable uptick in successful application submissions.

This early success encouraged us also to digitalise licensing application processes, booking and payment, presuming that it will be as straightforward as adding a merchant and checkout software to our website. However, we encountered a major obstacle – the absence of suitable payment or checkout software (CMS) available for our needs. Consequently, we had to develop a bespoke solution, underestimating the endeavour's complexity.

After investing an additional 40K and making minimal progress, it became evident that our small business lacked the resources to justify such a substantial investment. To make the venture financially viable, we realised the need to develop a system that other companies could use to offset the costs. Thus, the concept of a digital platform akin to booking.com but tailored to facilitate working opportunities for traders began to take shape.

As we deliberated on this idea, its potential impact on the industry became increasingly apparent. Realising the project's complexity, securing an investor became imperative. In 2011, we found an ideal partner in Imriel, a digital solutions provider boasting a team of over 200 developers. While their direct financial contribution was minimal, Imriel committed to assigning five developers to our project free of charge for as long as necessary. In early 2012, market People LTD was formed, and our digital journey started.