anupriya kukreja

Sol Guide Marketplace: Designing for Greater Trust and Bookings Conversion

Role
Marketplace Manager· Product Research · UX Strategy

Timeline
Jan 2025 (research) · Jan 2026 (concept design)

Context
Sol is a spirituality app with 100k+ users.

I was hired as its Marketplace Manager in May 2024, in charge of vetting, recruiting, and onboarding spiritual guides.

I was responsible for leading us to the launch of the marketplace: having spiritual guides create 100+ listings on their unique multi- faith offerings, with the right tags and visuals.

We eventually launched “circles”: community spaces where guides could post their wisdom under a dedicated topic, with the hopes of those driving leads for paid bookings.

I led the execution of bringing spiritual guides from Meetups, FB groups, etc., onto Sol to build their circles and invite their communities to join.

Problem: Full-Funnel Marketplace Diagnosis

Post the launch of the guides marketplace and circles, we saw scarce bookings.

1️⃣ Supply — Spiritual Guides

  • Guides were occasionally active on Circles, but not consistently.
  • They were struggling to convert engagement into bookings.
  • There was poor visibility into impact.
  • Trust signals were weak.
  • Content creation carried a high cognitive load.

2️⃣ Demand — Users / Spiritual Seekers

  • There weren’t many bookings and transactions post-launch.
  • Trust, vulnerability, and user experience appeared to be the main blockers.
  • Among the few bookings that occurred, there was a very high no-show rate.

3️⃣ Guide–User Interaction Layer

  • Engagement within Circles was not translating into bookings.
  • The underlying assumption was that more content → more bookings, but friction in content creation was not understood.

For each of these stakeholders, I did different forms of investigations and designed solutions accordingly.

Section A: Spiritual Guides

Methods Used

  • Survey of spiritual guide pain points (n= 40)
  • UX audit of the existing guide dashboard
  • Designing a fresh guide dashboard addressing their pain points

Key Survey Insights

I created this survey to understand the pain points of spiritual guides.

I have shared insights from this survey with design learnings.

Excerpts from guide survey conducted as part of internal research (September 2025).

Insight 1: Impact mattered as much as income

Guides wanted visibility into who they helped, not just revenue earned.

Insight 2: Their default leads pipeline was not digital in the first place!

They were used to referral-based (hence inbound) and serendipity-facilitated leads.

Insight 3: Comfort with marketing is scarce

Only half of the guides felt truly comfortable marketing their services!

Content is the bedrock of a sales funnel in spirituality, which is a high-trust and narrative-based process.

And if guides struggle with that (I know I do!), then we need to help them with this exact hesitation.

Insight 4: Sales activities felt unauthentic

Especially in spiritual and care-based work, self-promotion felt emotionally taxing and too “salesy.”

Insight 5: Tech challenges

Framing the Design Opportunity

Design Question
How might we design a guide dashboard that:

  • Makes impact visible
  • Reduces cognitive load
  • Makes content creation easier
  • Creates clear effort → outcome feedback loops?

Audit of Existing Dashboard

This is the current guide dashboard. It acts as more of an onboarding task list than a dashboard that guides can come back to for repeated activity.

Its listing of joined circles and one’s own circles does not create CTAs, nudges, reinforcement loops of impact, or income.

Based on the guide survey data, I designed the following dashboard:

Iteration 1

Here, I was playing around at first. My rationale was to use brand colors, the Sol logo, make it playful, and really “feel” spiritual.

Key Sections Proposed

  • This week’s summary
  • Having your circles and sessions listed, similar to the original dashboard
  • Mentioning and repeating the word impact in the headings
  • Impact Report (for insight 1)
  • Audience analytics (for insight 5)
  • Content prompts (for insight 3)

Iteration 2

My main struggle was the placement of each button. I switched sides, mulled over what the centre vs side placements should do, and so on.

Being very passionate about Insight 3 (content), I was very into having two whole sections to address that, but I later realized that may not be wise

Key Improvements

  • Greeting for the guide, instead of branding/ marketing phrase at the top
  • Profile section on the left, having circles and sessions listed under, more unified
  • Moving towards greater button organization
  • Impact Report centered (for insight 1)
  • Audience analytics as community trends put more succinctly (for insight 5)
  • Content prompts (for insight 3)

Final Dashboard

Key Improvements

  • Cleaner button organization: almost equal emphasis on each (size-wise)
  • Impact Report and engagement-centered (for insight 1 and 5)
  • Content prompts are now just one section (for insight 3)
  • Mentioned inquiries and no shows under engagement- so they can follow up strategically (insight 4)
  • More liquid glass-like translucency in boxes
  • Added Sol logo at the back for subtle branding
  • Audience analytics as community trends put more succinctly (for insight 5)
  • Added terms and conditions, report a bug, and contact support at the bottom

You can view this Mid-Fi wireframe in Figma here.

Section B: Seekers

Investigating No- Shows

During marketplace analysis, I identified that a significant proportion of confirmed session bookings resulted in no-shows.

This indicated that conversion alone was not the core issue — design, trust, commitment, or expectation-setting may have been breaking down after booking.

This also impacted guide motivation, leading them to not show up to Sol with enthusiasm. 

Hypothesis Development

I hypothesized that no-shows could be driven by:

  • Unclear session expectations
  • Low perceived credibility
  • Emotional hesitation prior to the session
  • Reminder friction (many folks get confused about where to even message the guide)
  • Weak accountability mechanisms

Validation Attempt

To validate these hypotheses:

  • I drafted a pre- booking mail adding more emotional safe space reinforcement nudges when the session is booked
  • I drafted a post-booking feedback survey to get a greater sense of the user friendliness of the tech flow
  • I initiated direct email outreach to no-show users (got very few responses)
  • Proposed embedding the survey into booking confirmation emails

Original pre-booking mail

Suggested pre- booking mail

The intention behind these mails is to reduce the stigma or shame around seeking help and truly validate the seeker’s inhibitions as perfectly normal and natural.

On the Moment of Accepted Booking

1 Hour Before Session

2 Minutes Before

Original post booking completion mail

Suggested post booking completion mail

This new mail goes much deeper. It has both emotional context and CTAs.

CTAs include referral codes (from Insight 2), review links, and a post-session feedback survey. Each of these action items come after an empathetic and emotionally rich statement.

And it ends with a reflection.

Section C: Guide- Seeker Interaction

Competitive Landscape Analysis

To better understand Sol’s positioning and structural friction points, I conducted a comparative analysis of other spiritual and wellness marketplaces.

The analysis examined:

  • Platform focus and positioning
  • Founding year and maturity
  • Traffic volume
  • Funding status
  • Revenue estimates
  • Feature similarities to Sol
  • Structural differences to Sol
  • Strategic learnings

The goal was to understand not only feature gaps, but how business maturity, scale, and trust signaling differed across platforms. This helped contextualize whether conversion challenges were due to early-stage positioning versus structural UX issues.

Platforms Reviewed

  • Noomii
  • Mindbody
  • Bark
  • SoulAdvisor
  • WellSet
  • Coachshaala
  • Etsy Witches

Each platform was evaluated across public interfaces and available financial/traffic data

Key Insights Derived

  1. Trust and matching mechanisms were stronger in platforms that led with structured intake or client-led submission. Other platforms had mastered having a strong sales & lead conversion funnel 
  2. Matching was done explicitly, intentionally, and more direct than Sol’s content-to-booking flow.
  3. Some platforms relied heavily on content ecosystems (blogs, articles) to generate traffic, not just marketplace listings.
  4. Mature platforms invested more in robust software infrastructure rather than lightweight community layers.

How Sol currently does matching

  • Users’ initial faith tradition preference informs what guides and sessions are shown to them algorithmically on the app, typically tagged with the same interest
  • Users join circles that resonate, also suggested based on similar tags, and guides who run those circles, who offer sessions, are supposed to get bookings
  • There is no guide blog or articles for SEO currently

Future matching robustness can include more user customization and guide expertise layers.

Synthesis

Analyzing the marketplace across supply (guides), demand (seekers), and the interaction layer revealed that the core issue was not motivation, but structural friction.

Guides were impact-driven but lacked visibility into the outcomes of their work. Seekers hesitated due to weak trust signals and unclear expectations.

Survey insights highlighted emotional and behavioral barriers. Competitive analysis exposed structural gaps in matching integration.

Together, these findings reframed the problem:

The marketplace did not fail due to low effort — it failed due to misaligned incentives, hidden trust signals, and disconnected user journeys.

This synthesis directly informed the dashboard redesign, prioritizing:

  • Visible impact metrics
  • Analytics from the app
  • Clear content-to-booking pathways
  • Feedback loops that link effort to outcome

The solution was not simply a UI improvement — it was a structural realignment of motivation, trust, and conversion within a two-sided marketplace.

Future research and strategies for marketplace improvement can include:

  • Survey for existing Sol app regular users to investigate their resistance to booking sessions with guides
  • Study the exact drop-off point after clicking on guide sessions, but before confirming booking, and experiment with nudges to improve booking rate
  • Apply suggested email nudges and make booking architecture more user-friendly to reduce no shows, thereby increasing reviews, referrals, revenue and guide motivation


Sol has a strong advantage of being an app of 100k users with day 1 retention. This can convert into a thriving marketplace with greater user psychology enhancement