Nordic Loop launched as a B2B auction marketplace for surplus construction materials. The core assumption: enterprises had surplus they couldn't move externally, a marketplace would solve the liquidity problem, and companies would pay for access.
As outreach scaled through September–October 2025, mixed signals came in from every direction. Email open rates ran at ~50%, but reply rates were low. That gap was its own signal: the problem framing wasn't urgent enough to compel a response.
Between September and November 2025, I ran 135 structured discovery conversations via email and calls, alongside in-person construction site visits across approximately 10 companies in Gothenburg with my co-founder. Three consistent patterns emerged.
Rondo Plast: "We already have customers or channels within whole Europe that buy our surplus raw materials." Polynova: "All production waste goes right straight back into production with all my contacts." Surplus was already moving through informal relationships built over years. A marketplace wasn't solving an unsolved problem.
Plastcom was already operating their own resale platform and had run this experiment longer than we had. Their answer was unambiguous: "Companies do not want to pay for the service. We are offering our service for free as a part of our sustainability work." A direct market participant had already confirmed the monetisation problem.
During in-person construction site visits, a different problem surfaced. Project managers didn't know what surplus existed across their own sites. Materials were stored informally, ownership was unclear, and coordination happened through personal relationships, not systems. The question wasn't "how do we sell this externally?" It was "how do we even know what we have?"
The tipping point came from the construction site visits. Talking directly to site managers made the internal visibility gap impossible to ignore. The external marketplace assumed that problem was already solved. It wasn't.
In November 2025, we aligned on the pivot: internal inventory-first, with the external marketplace repositioned as a downstream channel. This opened a simpler adoption path. One person inside a company could start immediately, without coordinating with any external party.
The guiding principle: start where coordination is lowest and control is highest.
Key shifts made alongside the product decision:
- Prioritised internal matching before external distribution
- Repositioned value from ESG-led messaging to cost avoidance and asset recovery
- Identified procurement and project managers as primary stakeholders, not just sustainability leads
- Simplified early adoption by removing cross-company logistics entirely
The pivot required concrete product decisions, not just repositioning:
- Material taxonomy scrapped entirely. The product had been built around raw material categories (plastic, glass, wood, metal). Internal inventory required asset-based categories (flooring, seating, partitions), how construction workers actually think. This was a full data model revamp.
- Escrow payment system deprioritised. A basic escrow mechanism had been built for the marketplace. It was not developed further. Internal inventory doesn't require payment infrastructure at that layer.
- Entire pricing model rebuilt. Commission-based marketplace pricing replaced with asset-based SaaS tiers: up to 500 assets per tier, site-based pricing for multi-site operations, overage fees above the limit.
November 2025 → January 2026: first demo. After the pivot, two additional engineers were brought in. A 4-week sprint was planned; a team member going on maternity leave extended it to 5 weeks. First working demo delivered at the start of January 2026. Full product completion by end of February. Roughly 3 months from decision to shipped product.
- Deal cycle cut from 4–5 months to approximately 2 months. Removing multi-party coordination as a prerequisite was the direct cause.
- Mod:group pilot: 5 items completed, 2 auction cycles run. Friction during the pilot confirmed the hypothesis. Internal coordination was the barrier, not external demand.
- Skanska: LOI signed; live construction site pilot with real operational data collected
- 185 outbound contacts across both phases. 7.4% converted to discovery meeting, 1.5% to pilot. Post-pivot outreach generated inbound interest from Platzer and Stena Metall. Both were larger companies than the pre-pivot pipeline had reached.
- Investor response shifted. At Go West 2026, investor interest was markedly stronger in the internal inventory system than in the external marketplace. The internal-first framing produced a cleaner investment case.
The product required multiple parties to coordinate logistics, ownership, and compliance before delivering any value. Every deal needed multi-party buy-in before it could start.
One person inside a company could start immediately. The decision surface shrank from "I need to convince four teams" to "I can start this on my own." The external marketplace evolved from core dependency to downstream capability.
The most dangerous assumption in a marketplace is that distribution is the bottleneck. In enterprise contexts, visibility often comes first. Organisations can't distribute what they can't find internally.
Email reply rates are a leading indicator of problem urgency. High open rates with low replies means the pain isn't acute enough to act on. Not that the audience is wrong.
A direct competitor telling you "no one will pay for this" is not a setback. It is the clearest possible market signal. Following it earlier would have saved several months.