One of the major worries that I've had when launching our marketplace was poaching; What if clients (the demand side) decide to hire developers (the supply side) outside of our platform? Of course, we had rules against that in terms of service, but hey, circumventing those is not a big risk.
But, luckily for us, the value that we provided to both parties (and still do) outweighed the risk of losing their accounts for violating TOS, so we very rarely see that.
Regarding chicken and egg problem, we manually found and pre-screened 10 people to provide supply in advance, so when the first client came, they'd have someone to hire. Earned $13 the third day after launch. Happiest day ever :)
Today we have 19 employees and are profitable (we've hit profitability the third year, we're now 7 years "old"). https://codeable.io
1. I push a hotfix to GitHub.
2. Jenkins (which is on Google Cloud) builds it, and it already has all the Docker steps cached from previous builds, so it's fast.
3. Jenkins pushes the image to Google Cloud repo, which is almost instantaneous
4. Kubernetes (also on Google Cloud) pulls the image and makes a new deployment
I was once in the camp of small Docker images, but realized it's simply not worth the tradeoff, since there's only one upside to them, and that upside is fast transfer of images.
However, that argument becomes pointless when using a proper CI/CD stack. As a developer, you don't normally upload images yourself, but push changes to GitHub, then Jenkins/Travis/whatever takes over, builds the image, and pushes it into production/staging/whatever. Since CD tool of choice is usually also on the cloud, we don't have to worry about image size, nor to any of the CD vendors charge for data transfer.
I'd rather have bigger images (I base mine off Debian now, used to be Alpine) and not have to worry with lack of ported tools and libraries, than vice-versa.
But, luckily for us, the value that we provided to both parties (and still do) outweighed the risk of losing their accounts for violating TOS, so we very rarely see that.
Regarding chicken and egg problem, we manually found and pre-screened 10 people to provide supply in advance, so when the first client came, they'd have someone to hire. Earned $13 the third day after launch. Happiest day ever :)
Today we have 19 employees and are profitable (we've hit profitability the third year, we're now 7 years "old"). https://codeable.io