At Barta, a marketplace for cosplay and creator communities, my role as Growth & Content Lead covered go-to-market planning, acquisition, community, funnel design, and experimentation. The work ran from March to August 2026, while the marketplace was preparing to launch.
There was no mature acquisition engine to optimise. The immediate task was to give prospective creators and sellers a clear reason to pay attention, then build a practical path from that interest into participation.
That work reinforced a distinction I consider essential: getting attention, securing a registration, and helping someone get started are separate jobs.
The proposition has to make sense to the audience
A marketplace can describe itself in a sentence and still leave prospective users unsure about what it means for them. A creator, a seller, and a wider community member may approach the same product with different questions.
My work included developing audience-specific messaging and calls to action. The aim was to connect the marketplace’s proposition with a next step that made sense for the person receiving the message.
This is a useful starting point for an early business. Before asking which channel will deliver the most traffic, ask whether the invitation is clear. What is the person joining? Why might it be useful? What happens after they respond?
Build the path beyond the campaign
The acquisition journey connected social discovery to a waitlist, registration, and onboarding. Organic content and paid campaigns supported those steps, with Meta and TikTok used for paid acquisition. The wider work also involved Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Discord.
I worked on targeting, budgets, creative testing, waitlist development, and creator and seller onboarding. I also built and managed the founding Discord community.
Looking at those activities as a connected journey changes how they should be evaluated. A campaign can bring someone to the door, but the explanation, invitation, and support that follow affect whether they continue. Acquisition planning needs to include that handover.
Use community as a source of understanding
The founding community provided a way to maintain contact, understand questions, and support early participants. Channel data and community feedback informed weekly growth decisions, alongside reporting on reach, traffic, registrations, and onboarding.
Creative work included testing hooks, formats, and calls to action. The point was to keep learning about the route into the marketplace, rather than treating the launch plan as a finished answer.
Community participation also needs to be understood on its own terms. Someone joining a conversation has taken a meaningful step, but that step does not tell us everything about their future use of the product.
Keep the measures separate
The reported launch outcomes were more than 390 waitlist registrations and 130 founding users onboarded. The founding Discord community included 130 sellers and creators. These figures come from my CV and project materials; the user and community counts may overlap and should not be added together.
Those results describe early participation. They do not establish retained usage, transactions, revenue, or marketplace liquidity. I do not have a supporting breakdown here to claim a specific acquisition cost or improvement from an individual experiment.
Keeping those distinctions visible makes the work easier to assess. It also makes the next question clearer: after attracting and onboarding people, what evidence would show that the marketplace is becoming useful enough for them to return?
Acquisition is a sequence of commitments
The lesson I take from Barta is to design for the next meaningful commitment, then support it. Different stages need different messages, different measures, and sometimes different kinds of help.
For the full scope, role, and reported outcomes, read the Barta Marketplace case study.