Your users' users

Most platforms are built for one person. The one paying the invoice. That is first-order thinking, and it is where most products stop.

We think about it differently. Our direct users are wholesalers and disposition managers. But the people those users spend their whole day selling to are investors. Buyers. And the buyer experience is just as much a part of our product as anything we ship for our paying user.

Why the second order matters

If a buyer has a bad experience on our platform, they stop engaging with the listings our user sends them. They stop clicking. They stop replying. They churn quietly, without ever saying a word.

When that happens, our user's list gets weaker. Deals take longer to place. Revenue drops. Eventually, our user leaves too, because the platform stopped helping them make money.

If the buyer has a bad experience, they leave. When they leave, our user loses their pipeline. When our user loses their pipeline, we lose them too. The chain only works if every link works.

So the buyer experience is not a nice-to-have. It is part of the core loop. If we only optimize for the wholesaler, we are optimizing for the top of an hourglass while ignoring the bottom.

A concrete example: we do not force buyers to sign in

Here is something small on the surface that turns out to be large in practice.

Most disposition platforms require the buyer to create an account before they can view a listing. Enter an email. Create a password. Verify. Log in. If they lose the password, forget about ever seeing them again.

On the surface, that sounds protective. The platform gets a user record. The wholesaler thinks their list is more secure. Everybody wins.

Except the buyer. The buyer now has one more account to manage for every wholesaler they work with. If they are working with ten of us, they have ten accounts, ten passwords, and ten reasons to stop clicking the next link.

We decided this is wrong for a specific reason. If you have already vetted an investor, you already have their phone number. You already have their email. You know who they are. Asking them to create an account is asking them to re-introduce themselves to a platform that already knows them. It is friction without purpose.

On Covent, when you distribute a listing to a vetted investor, they do not have to sign in. They click the link. They see the deal. That is the entire flow.

The obvious counterargument, and why it is wrong

The counterargument goes like this. If buyers do not have accounts, how do you track who is engaging? How do you know who opened the listing, who clicked, who came back three times?

Fair question. And it reveals what most platforms actually mean when they talk about analytics.

A lot of platforms track clicks at the listing level. The listing got opened 40 times. Great. But unless you can tie those 40 opens back to a specific human contact, the number is useless. You cannot follow up with a listing. You follow up with a person.

Listing-level metrics tell you whether a deal got attention. Contact-level metrics tell you who to call next. One is a vanity number. The other changes what you do tomorrow morning.

• Listing got 40 clicks. What do you do with that?
• John Doe opened the listing four times in two days. Now you know who to call first.

The second one is the only one that moves a deal.

How we get contact-level tracking without forcing a login

This is the trick, and it is why the two ideas fit together. Because we send listings through vetted distribution, every link is already tied to a known contact. The buyer does not have to log in for us to know who they are. We already know. We attributed it the moment you added them to your list.

That means you get the analytics that actually matter — who opened, who clicked, how many times, how recently — without forcing a single buyer to create an account.

For the buyer, it is frictionless. For the wholesaler, the data is richer than what most platforms provide, because it is tied to a human instead of an anonymous click.

Win-win instead of lose-lose

Most platforms end up in a lose-lose. Buyers are annoyed because they have to manage yet another account. Wholesalers think they are getting security and tracking, but the tracking they actually receive is aggregate, anonymous, and hard to act on.

We think the right version of this is a win-win. The buyer has a clean experience and keeps engaging. The wholesaler gets contact-level data that is actually useful. The platform gets a healthy loop that does not leak users out the bottom.

Bottom line

When you build for a two-sided workflow, you have to build for both sides. Not equally, not identically, but deliberately. The buyer experience is not somebody else's problem. It is part of the product.

Small decisions about friction, accounts, and tracking are not small decisions. They compound across every listing you send and every buyer you work with. Over time, the platform that respects the buyer's time wins the buyer's attention. And that attention is the thing our direct users are actually paying for.