The AI Agent race begins
In early 2024, AI agents were barely an emergent concept. By 2025, they'd skyrocket into the mainstream. People began seeking ways to harness AI systems, and Relevance AI was well-positioned to capitalise on this shift.
I was part of an ambitious project to create an AI agent marketplace, connecting users with agent builders.
My role
Research and testing
Prototyping
Production ready UI design
My team
1 x Product designer (me)
1 x Product manager
4 x Software engineers
User problems
🧑💼
Recruiters (demand side)
Businesses and individuals want to adopt the capabilities of AI agents. However, they struggle to find suitable use cases, and lack the technical expertise to set them up.
🧑💻
AI agencies (supply side)
AI builders and automation agencies are an emerging business model, but struggle to find clients and leads.
Design iterations
After launch, usability problems quickly emerged. Recruiters lacked trust and confidence when cloning templates, while builders felt limited in how they could customize and market their templates.
The following are three examples of design iterations I made in response.
Template listing page
V1 was a simple visual modal. Post-launch, we saw significant friction around cloning and purchasing templates. There was not enough information to explain what a template actually did, no trust or reputation signals, and zero SEO value from a modal-based approach.
My redesign moved to a full listing page, swapped the visual header for a live task preview, and introduced a review system.
Before
After
2. Hero section
While most 'nice to haves' were not in MVP, the landing page hero section was the exception. I wanted to make a big visual splash when users first land onto our Marketplace.
The following are some iterations.
v0 carefree exploration
This version features our Invent product and two featured templates. An entry point to invent doesn't make sense, as it takes people off the marketplace.
Featured carosel exploration
This version uses 2 columns with clear, bold elements. I explored things like glassmorphic buttons on the carousel.
Bento exploration
I tried a version with a more scalable hero section with featured cards. We also wanted to highlight the categories more as an entry point.
Shipped v1
I went with a playful search CTA. The design entails floating agent avatars and colorful grainy gradient, and I worked with front-end dev to create delightful animations. Link to post.
Template cards
I created v1 cards that were clean, playful, and on-brand.
After launch, feedback from both recruiters and builders revealed two core problems:
For users, there was little beyond a title and integrations to drive comparison or click-through. For builders, standing out was nearly impossible.
The redesign introduced richer descriptions for context, alongside a review system to build credibility. I hypothesise these changes will strengthen trust signals and SEO discoverability.
Before
After
I'm still monitoring whether this change will cause any metric improvements.
PM and I made a Posthog dashboard to track clone % after click.
I iterated a lot on this 👇
The builder's experience
Listings page
The builder manages all their templates in the builder platform, in the 'listings page'. Builders can see the status of their submitted templates, and make edits.
Builder profile
I designed a simple screen for builders to update the profile that gets displayed to recruiters. This is also where builders set up their Stripe account to receive payment.
Publish to marketplace
After the user finishes making the template, they can publish to marketplace via a modal. I cover all edge cases such free vs paid templates, builder profile not set up, and Stripe not set up.
🔎
My research approach
Tight timelines shaped my research approach. I workshopped with my PM to prioritise MVP features based on existing marketplace patterns, and set up a dashboard to track key metrics.
For user feedback, I built a Slack community of power users and AI agencies to enable fast, direct feedback loops.
🔮
Marketplace vision
Create a thriving agent ecosystem for recruiters and AI agencies, eliminate the complexity of adopting AI automations, and establish Relevance as the leader in agentic automation.
Business opportunity
AI agencies are emerging fast, and demand for automation is high, yet no high-quality AI automation marketplace exists to serve them.
Building one creates a compounding flywheel: as recruiters and AI agencies adopt the marketplace, both become paying customers of Relevance AI, driving revenue growth.
Demand-side metrics
# of marketplace agents implemented (run once successfully) - Validates customer desirability for agents
# of active marketplace agents (run 5 times a week) - Indicates that agents are providing ongoing value
Supply-side metrics
# of approved agents
# of active builders - indicates builders see value
Outcomes
The product is still ongoing, and we get ~920 clones per week.
4.3% of users who clone a marketplace listing upgrade to a paid plan. The total average of all sign ups is around 1.9%.
62% of users clone free template after clicking on the template
Paid templates have low purchase rate. We are doing work now on this.
Challenges and learnings
🥶
Cold start problem
The product was functional, but not thriving like we wanted.
Marketplaces depend on the network effect. As a team, we didn't put enough resources into overcoming the cold start problem, as there wasn't enough high quality templates on the supply-side.
We are now alleviating this with events and hackathons.
⏳
Time crunch
With a tight deadline in time for our builder hackathon, my team and I worked tirelessly whilst balancing other projects.
This led to sacrifices and trade-offs in running deep research, or effort in better cultivating the community aspect of running a marketplace.
🎯
Prioritisation choices
If I redid this project, I would have pushed prioritisation differently.
We included Stripe and payments in the MVP. We later learned that paid templates were rarely cloned.
We also didn't give enough love to community building, the cold start problem, and SEO optimisation.
We later had to rebuild the marketplace as a seperate web app for SEO.