Building a Vertical Marketplace in Finland: Lessons from Willit

Marketplaces are notoriously hard to start. You need supply and demand at once, and a thin reason for both sides to show up before either side is there. On the Trusted Cofounder podcast, Risto Holappa walked through how he is building Willit, the marketplace for anything foraged, fished, or hunted in Finland. Three lessons stood out for anyone building a vertical marketplace here.

1. Find the customer before you build the company

Risto's instinct was to validate demand before incorporating anything. As he put it in the episode:

I always think it's great when a company tries to find its customer before they make a company.

Willit did not start as a marketplace. It started as lähikala.fi, a side project to help his father-in-law sell fresh catch online. Game meat came next, from a decade of moose hunting and a network of hunters with full freezers and no channel. Only once the supply side was real did the marketplace take shape. The vertical was chosen because Risto already lived inside the supply.

2. Remove every step of manual onboarding

The quiet killer of vertical marketplaces is operational drag: hand-holding each producer, manually entering listings, chasing compliance. Risto designed Willit to avoid all of it:

I want to make the marketplace as easy to use as possible that I don't have to do any manual work.

Finnish food-authority rules for fresh and game produce are strict, but instead of becoming a manual checkpoint, each rule is broken into a small form the producer fills out themselves. Compliance is enforced underneath, not babysat on top. That is what lets one founder run a marketplace spread across Northern Finland.

3. Fund the infrastructure that competitors will not

The hardest part of this vertical is physical: small producers lack cold storage and pickup logistics. Willit's answer is Willit24, a network of glass-fronted shipping-container pickup stations, part-funded by the European Rural Fund and Oulu Region Leader. It doubles as warehousing for producers who have none. The expensive, unglamorous infrastructure is exactly the moat a pure software competitor will not build.

The founder takeaway

Willit is a one-founder company today, with the rest of the team operating project by project across Oulu, Kainuu, and Vaasa. That works for now, but most marketplaces eventually need a complementary cofounder to own the side the founder cannot. If you are building a vertical marketplace and know which half of the company you are missing, browse founders in the directory or read how to find a cofounder in Finland.

Listen to the full conversation with Risto: Building Finland's foraged marketplace.