Building an embedded ecosystem within HRIS
How an HRIS native marketplace went from a blank page to becoming a partner ecosystem and a real revenue channel for both sides.
Context
Repute builds HRIS, the software a company's HR team uses every day to run payroll, track leave, and manage hiring. Basically HR's version of an operating system. I joined as a founding product manager in December 2021, and one thing Repute didn't have yet was a marketplace: a place inside the HR software itself where an employer could add extra tools, like a background check provider or a tax filing service, without ever leaving the platform they already used every day. Four different HR platforms sit under the Repute umbrella, GreytHR, AdrenalinMAX, GelyxHR, and PocketHRMS, and none of them had this. If an HR manager wanted a background check vendor, they had to go find one on their own, sign a separate contract, and figure out how to connect it themselves. There was no aisle to browse, so employers rarely found these tools, and the vendors offering them never got the business.
What was needed
Just adding a page of logos wasn't going to work. I'd seen enough software marketplaces to know the pattern: a company builds a directory, gets a partner or two to sign up, and then nothing happens because nobody actually buys anything through it. If the vendors we listed didn't see real business coming from being on Repute, they'd stop caring about the listing within a few months, and the whole thing would quietly die. So the real question wasn't how to build a marketplace page. It was how to make browsing actually turn into a signed deal for the partner on the other end.
Work I did
I built the marketplace from the ground up across all four HR platforms, spanning categories like HR tech, tax, accounting, benefits, and IT service management, so an employer could find whatever kind of tool they needed in one place. Then I designed the part that actually mattered: a sales flow that could take someone from browsing a listing to a closed deal, not just a click-through to another website. Once that was working, I built a developer platform so partner vendors could list and manage their own apps directly, instead of emailing my team every time they wanted to update a listing or add a new one.
What helped
Before I built the self-serve version, I onboarded the first batch of partners by hand myself. I sat with them, listed their tools, and watched what happened next. That's how I learned what actually made a listing worth trusting, things like clear pricing, an honest description, and a fast response time, rather than guessing at it from a spreadsheet.
Results
The marketplace now covers roughly 35,000 employers across India and the Middle East. Within six months of launch, it was already driving 45% of partners' monthly closures, meaning almost half the deals our partner vendors closed each month were coming directly through Repute. That took the marketplace from zero revenue to 3X monthly revenue within 18 months.
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