Cold start cripples two‑sided marketplaces: new items lack behavioral signals and social proof, ranking models under‑expose them, which delays the very signals needed to rank them well. This talk shares our journey to break down this loop at GetYourGuide, a marketplace for travel experiences. We evolved our exploration/activation framework over the past three years with three complementary interventions: guaranteed exposure at strategic positions, a real‑time reranker to allocate that exposure efficiently under tight latency budgets, and guardrail boosting for unactivated items when primary assessment slots are empty.

The talk is a pragmatic case study: we’ll show how experiment‑led exploration shaped the system over the last 3 years. We will share what worked, what did not, and how we managed trade-offs between short-term revenue and long-term marketplace health. Attendees will leave with a blueprint for safely accelerating early traction in their own marketplaces, combining learning‑to‑rank with exposure guarantees without sacrificing overall business health.