Part 4 of 4 — Why I’m Building Tools for Markets That Don’t Exist Yet
Over the first three parts of this series, I’ve described a pattern (thin markets share a common anatomy), quantified its scale (up to $10 trillion in missing global commerce), and explained the infrastructure I’m building to address it (a configurable open-source toolkit). This final instalment is personal. It’s about what I’m actually looking for — and what I’m offering in return.
My position
I am retired. I am self-funded. I have no venture capital investors, no board to report to, no pitch deck with a hockey-stick revenue projection.
I could present this as a limitation, but it’s actually the most unusual thing about DeeperPoint. Because I’m not optimising for a Series A or an exit multiple, I have the freedom to optimise for something that venture-backed projects almost never can: long-term structural impact. I can choose open source over lock-in. I can let the framework evolve at the pace of real-world learning rather than the pace of a burn rate. I can say no to approaches that would generate revenue quickly but undermine the architecture.
I do have constraints. I can’t risk financial ruin in pursuit of impact. It means I spend carefully, I don’t over-commit, and the proprietary layers of the toolkit exist partly because the labour of customisation is real and has to be funded. But within those guardrails, the project is free to pursue the problem rather than the quarterly target.
That freedom is a competitive advantage. I intend to use it.
What success looks like
Not a unicorn valuation. Not a platform with a million users.
Success, for me, is three to five sponsored marketplaces running on the DeeperPoint toolkit in distinct verticals within two to three years. Real transactions happening that would not have happened otherwise. A Saskatchewan specialty grain cooperative reaching a Filipino craft brewer. A rural community connecting to the heritage timber framer who actually has the skills for their restoration project. A diaspora family in Toronto managing a property in Addis Ababa through a platform they can trust.
Small numbers. Real impact. Proof that the pattern holds — that the veterinarian’s x-ray was right, and the same diagnostic toolkit works across different species of thin market.
Who I’m looking for
To extend the analogy from Part 1 one last time: I’ve built the x-ray machine and the surgical suite. What I need now are the zoo directors — people who know a specific class of animal intimately and want to make its market healthier — and the breed specialists — people with deep domain expertise in a specific vertical.
Concretely, I’m looking for five kinds of people:
Domain experts and vertical sponsors. You run a trade association, a cooperative, an NGO, a provincial agency, or a municipal economic development office — and you know a specific matching market is broken. You have the community trust and the industry knowledge to stand up a marketplace. What you lack is the software infrastructure. That’s what DeeperPoint provides.
Policy thinkers. You’re working on trade diversification, workforce development, or economic inclusion. You understand that Mark Carney’s Middle Powers vision requires tactical infrastructure, not just diplomatic agreements. MarketForge is the software realisation of that strategic intent — the layer that makes thin trade corridors commercially navigable.
Investors and venture builders. You see the commercial potential in matching platforms for specific verticals — transaction fees, premium services, data products — and you want to build businesses on top of proven infrastructure rather than reinventing the plumbing. A venture firm managing a portfolio of thin-market startups could use the shared DeeperPoint framework to mine structural commonalities across its portfolio, making each venture more capital-efficient. The underlying market physics are the same; the revenue model differs by vertical.
Open-source developers. You want to contribute to an MIT-licensed harness that solves real-world semantic matching problems at the intersection of AI and market design. The Cosolvent codebase is on GitHub. Pull requests are welcome.
Curious generalists. You don’t fit the categories above, but you recognise thin markets in your own world — in your industry, your community, your country — and you want to understand the framework better before deciding how to engage. Start with the whitepaper, try the market diagnostic, read the story posts — and then get in touch.
What I bring
Fifty years of cross-domain engineering experience. A working R&D prototype with published roadmaps for each component. A rigorous analytical framework grounded in the transaction cost literature. An open-source codebase. A growing body of published analysis — twelve posts and counting — that demonstrates the framework on real markets. And a concrete demonstration milestone on the horizon: GPSim, a market simulator modelling the Canadian specialty grain-to-Asia scenario end to end, currently well into development.
I should also credit the people who have helped bring this to life. The DeeperPoint codebase has been built at my personal expense by a small, talented development team in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Yes, I have paid them for their work — but their genuine interest and enthusiasm for the concept has been invaluable, well beyond what a paycheque can buy. They believed in the idea early, and they continue to push it forward. They are also building their own professional ambitions and looking for opportunities to develop independently, which I actively encourage. There is a pleasing symmetry here: a project dedicated to making developing-economy markets more functional is itself being built by developers in one of those economies.
And time. The most valuable thing a retired person has, and the scarcest resource in the startup world.
The invitation
Getting money is secondary. Finding the right people is the point.
If you see a thin market in your world — a place where transactions should be happening but aren’t, where AI-driven matching could unlock real value for real participants — I want to hear from you. If you are not the right person, maybe a colleague, friend or acquaintance would be interested.
Explore the theory. Read the whitepaper. Review the toolkit. Examine the code. And reach out.