The challenge
Meridian connected businesses with specialized consultants across eleven categories. Classic cold-start failure: buyers found too few relevant consultants and left, consultants received no requests and churned. Spreading marketing across eleven categories meant none of them ever reached liquidity. Match rate sat at 12% and time-to-first-match averaged nine days.
What we did
Concentrated everything on one vertical
The hardest recommendation we made was to stop marketing ten of the eleven categories. We picked the one with the highest transaction value and the tightest supply, and put the entire budget behind it.
Seeded supply before driving demand
Targeted outreach and a guaranteed-lead offer brought 340 vetted consultants into the focus category before we spent meaningfully on buyer acquisition. Liquidity has to exist before demand arrives.
Rebuilt the matching experience
The old flow made buyers browse profiles. We replaced it with a structured brief that produced three curated matches within an hour. Time to first match dropped from nine days to 3.4 hours.
Built programmatic SEO for the long tail
Category-plus-location and category-plus-specialization pages captured buyers with highly specific intent — and, importantly, gave consultants a reason to complete detailed profiles.
The result
Completed transactions grew 518% and the focus category reached genuine liquidity within seven months. Meridian then reopened three additional categories using the same playbook, each reaching liquidity faster than the first.
“Telling us to shut off ten of our eleven categories was the last thing we wanted to hear, and it was completely right. We got one category working properly and now we have a repeatable playbook for the rest.”