Case Study
Fractional CTO (Product & Engineering)
From concept to launch-ready regional marketplace
Coconut Spaces is a two-sided marketplace for local spaces, designed to help event organisers discover venues and help space owners generate demand from underused assets. As Fractional CTO, I led product strategy, technical architecture, brand direction, and full-stack platform development, evolving the product through three brand iterations and delivering a launch-ready marketplace with paying users, and a regional go-to-market foundation.
- Role
- Fractional CTO (Product & Engineering)
- Duration
- 2025 - 2026
- Industry
- Marketplace / PropTech / Events
- Team Size
- 2 co-founders
What Coconut Spaces needed to solve
Coconut Spaces started as an early-stage marketplace idea with clear potential but no technical foundation, no product structure, and no defined brand. Like many two-sided products, the hard part was never just building the software — it was finding the right positioning, naming, and launch strategy to make the platform feel credible to both venue owners and organisers.
As the sole technical resource across a 12-month engagement, the challenge was to build, iterate, and maintain a production-grade marketplace at pace — covering architecture, DevOps, QA, SEO, analytics, payments, and product ownership simultaneously — while absorbing multiple strategic pivots and three complete rebrands without losing momentum or stability.
Evolving the product through multiple brand iterations
The platform moved through SpaceBook and SpaceBay before settling on Coconut Spaces. Each iteration required domain migration, SEO consolidation, UI updates, and URL restructuring — all managed without disrupting live users or losing accumulated search equity.
Designing for a two-sided marketplace from scratch
The platform needed to work for both space owners listing venues and organisers searching for somewhere suitable, each with different motivations, trust concerns, and onboarding needs — built and iterated by a single technical resource.
Absorbing frequent strategic pivots
The product direction shifted several times during the engagement — from instant book to enquiry-only, to request-to-book, and back again. Each pivot required architectural rework while maintaining platform stability and user experience quality.
Building a regional launch foundation without fragmenting the product
The platform needed a URL structure, SEO strategy, and content model that could launch in a focused geography while remaining ready to expand into additional regions, towns, and categories over time.
Reducing operational bottlenecks
Content, categories, listings, and trust signals needed to be manageable through internal admin tooling rather than relying on ad hoc database changes or developer support for every iteration.
How I tackled it
My approach combined product strategy, brand thinking, UX design, and full-stack implementation. Rather than treating these as separate phases, I worked across all of them in parallel so the product, content model, and launch plan could shape each other as the marketplace matured.
Brand & Positioning
Shaped the product through three naming and brand iterations, culminating in Coconut Spaces — a more distinctive identity better suited to long-term brand building and regional expansion.
Marketplace Product Design
Designed the full product experience for browsing, listing, booking, and managing spaces, with attention to trust signals, user personas, and how different user types move through the platform at different stages of the marketplace lifecycle.
Technical Architecture & Full-Stack Delivery
Built the platform using a modern stack — Next.js, Supabase, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS — selected for speed of iteration, scalable listing management, and production reliability. Shipped features including Stripe Connect payments, recurring subscriptions, real-time messaging, booking management, and a full admin dashboard.
DevOps, Monitoring & Quality
Established CI/CD workflows via GitHub Actions, implemented error tracking via Sentry, and set up uptime monitoring via Uptime Robot. Maintained 99% uptime throughout the engagement with zero production outages.
Admin & Operations Tooling
Created internal workflows and admin capabilities so categories, listings, verification requests, and operational changes could be managed without every decision requiring direct developer involvement.
SEO & Regional Launch Planning
Shaped the URL structure, page taxonomy, and regional rollout model so the platform could launch in Hampshire first while remaining ready to expand into additional towns and regions. Achieved position 4.7 average ranking and 32.6% click-through rate in Google Search Console.
Trust & Marketplace Quality
Implemented verification workflows, seller credibility signals, reporting mechanisms, and a tiered bug severity framework aligned with industry standards to keep the platform dependable as the supply side grew.
What we achieved together
The result was not just a prototype but a production-grade marketplace with real paying users, functioning payments, and a technical foundation ready to scale.
Production marketplace with real paying users
Delivered a live, functioning two-sided marketplace with real user registrations, completed onboarding flows, and Stripe-confirmed payments — proving the core marketplace loop works end to end.
810+ commits across 12 months of continuous delivery
Maintained an unbroken record of development activity from the first day of the engagement, covering features, fixes, infrastructure, and documentation across the full product lifecycle.
Region-first go-to-market model with working SEO foundation
Established a Hampshire-first launch approach with 22 indexed pages in Google Search Console, a 32.6% click-through rate, and average position 4.7 — all built organically without paid acquisition.
99% uptime with zero production outages
Maintained platform stability throughout the full engagement. Independent monitoring confirmed 99% availability with only two minor incidents across the final 30 days, totalling approximately 10 minutes of downtime.
Operational control kept in-house
Built with internal flexibility in mind so content, listings, and marketplace operations could evolve quickly without being slowed down by rigid tooling or developer dependency for routine changes.
Technologies involved
Coconut Spaces was built as a modern marketplace product with a stack chosen for speed, flexibility, and production reliability during an intensive early-stage build phase.
Hi, I'm Steven Noble
I'm a Fractional CTO and Digital Product Leader with nearly two decades of experience helping technology companies scale their engineering teams, improve delivery, and build the foundations they need to grow. I work with startups and scale-ups across the UK, typically on 6–12 month engagements.