Engineering: web and mobile marketplace
LikeSpaces
Two countries, two currencies, two payment regimes, one codebase
The problem
Launching a marketplace in a second country usually means forking it. Forks drift, and every feature ends up built twice.
What we built
- One platform, two countries. Pakistan at the root and the United Arab Emirates under a country path, with country behaviour expressed as configuration rather than branches: currency, whether guests can book, whether host payouts are open, and which payment methods render.
- Rules enforced server side, not in the UI. A payment method that is off for a country is refused by the server, not merely hidden, and a payout request in a country that is not yet settled returns an explicit unavailable response rather than failing quietly.
- Native iOS and Android apps, live in Pakistan, built against the same API as the web platform.
- A paid inspection flow, where a guest books and pays for a visit to a space before committing to a full booking. Pakistan only.
- Discovery built for machine readers as well as people: pre-rendering, segmented sitemaps, and a fix for the soft 404 pattern marketplaces generate when a filter combination returns nothing.
Where the automation sits, and where it does not
The architecture earned its keep when the UAE opened for host sign-ups while guest booking and payouts stayed deliberately closed pending banking arrangements. No second codebase, and no risk of a half-configured country taking real money.
What we would not claim
We publish the live listing count as counted, not rounded up, and we publish no booking count or time-to-first-booking figure because neither has been measured in a way we would stand behind.
Platform settings and listing count checked September 2026.
Your turn
We set the baseline before the work starts.
That is the part that makes a number mean something a year later.