An online marketplace for handmade and small-batch goods signs up about 4,000 new sellers a month. Six in ten list at least one product. Fewer than one in four of those make a sale within 60 days, and most sellers who have not sold by day 60 never list again. Sellers who do make a first sale early tend to stay for years.
Design something that gets more new sellers to a first sale. Choose the seller you are building for, identify the real obstacle, and propose and prioritise a solution. Include what you would measure and what could go wrong.
100 points, 60% to pass.
Use the funnel given: the drop is between listing and first sale, and first sale predicts retention, so the goal is time-to-first-sale for listed sellers. Hypotheses to separate: listings are poor (photos, pricing, titles), listings are invisible (a ranking system that favours sellers with sales history — a cold-start problem), or demand for the category is thin. The strongest answers pick the likely cause and design for it — e.g. a new-seller visibility boost with quality gates, or guided listing improvement — and name the risk (buyers seeing lower-quality items, established sellers losing ranking). Measure share of listed sellers with a sale by day 30, with buyer return rate as a guardrail.