In May 2025, we finally opened RETRO//VRS Marketplace to buyers after over a year of development. With this milestone, I wanted to reflect on all the challenges and stories from the development experience. The entire RETRO//VRS Marketplace website was built by two developers with very limited resources.
Getting Our Priorities Straight
A recurring challenge for us was repeatedly re-prioritising the features we needed for our MVP (Minimum Viable Product). When first starting on a project, you imagine that you’ll be able to integrate more features in the MVP than is reasonable. It’s just easier to imagine a product with more features before running into the many development challenges- no surprises there. One thing that lengthened the development process was choosing to move one big feature on the back burner for later, despite having spent hours on research and development already.
A feature we originally envisaged for MVP involved complex 3D photogrammetry technology. Photogrammetry is the generation of a 3D rendering of an object based on photos taken from different angles. This involves highly specific skills that our humble team of two developers did not have, at least not to the degree we needed.
We evaluated various options and spent hours researching possible solutions, looking for services that we could integrate to our project. With our very limited resources, we did not find a solution that was both affordable and to a high enough standard we were looking for, plus taking into account all the other features we still had to develop.
In autumn 2024, we decided to put 3D renderings on the back shelf and exclude it from the MVP. Despite being visually impactful, the feature wasn’t crucial in any way for the first version of RETRO//VRS Marketplace. None of the initial core values or offerings of the product depended on the 3D renderings in order for us to launch. Despite the time spent looking for a possible solution, we had to put it to the side and focus on more important things.
Launching Slowly But Surely
By February 2025, we were ready for our first users. However, we quickly realised that there were a pile of bugs and unexpected technical issues to solve before opening the website to buyers. Browser compatibility, device-related issues, and other fun surprises that don’t come up when testing in development.
On RETRO//VRS Marketplace, every user is both a buyer and a seller. As far as the software goes, seller-related actions involve a more complex flow, resulting in more bugs and edge cases to deal with. Thus, we had to go through an adjustment period with our first partner seller to make sure everything would be good to go before dropping the link to potential buyers. During this time we also implemented some new features that were suggested by the pilot seller, and took the time to make the website mobile-friendly.
Finally in mid-May, we were ready to start sharing the link with potential buyers. Although it lengthened the process, progressively releasing the marketplace to sellers before buyers is something that helped us catch a lot of bugs, issues and feel more serene about releasing with such a small dev team.
Planning For The Future
RETRO//VRS Marketplace involves the blockchain, but is made to be accessible to users who are not involved with the blockchain in any way. We call it “web 2.5”. Despite the blockchain-related features not being visible to end users, we still had to build secure and upgradeable smart contracts with the future in mind. We would have to add new features in the future and most likely (definitely) will need to make changes to the smart contract eventually. As with many other things, making a smart contract future-proof is a lot more time consuming. To do things well, we couldn't cut corners, even if it meant a longer time until MVP.
A long but eventful journey
Although the process felt endless at times, RETRO//VRS Marketplace is really starting to look like something. Luckily the two of us developers had a complimentary skills, which meant we were able to cover the range of what we needed for MVP just as a pair. Stay tuned for more developer stories!
