A Disability Services Marketplace for Kinora’s NDIS Community
The NDIS — Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme — gives people living with disability funding to access the supports and services they need to build capacity and live better lives. In theory, it puts choice and control in the hands of scheme participants. In practice, navigating the NDIS is hard. The rules are complex, the language is dense, and most people starting out have no idea where to begin.
Kinora was built to fix that. It started as a moderated online community — a safe, trusted space where people on the NDIS, their carers families could ask questions, share experiences, and get real answers from people who understood the scheme. No sales pitches. No hard selling. Just genuine support and verified information.
It worked. The community grew fast. And as it grew, something interesting happened: providers wanted in.
NDIS Participants and Service Providers were having meaningful community discussions. The marketplace was a natural next step.
Kinora had a problem that most platforms would love to have. Its community was growing quickly, providers were actively engaged, and participants were asking where they could find services. But the community forum had strict moderation rules — providers couldn't use it to market their services or chase leads. That was by design. It was what made the community trustworthy.
So Kinora needed a marketplace — a separate, structured space where providers could present their services professionally and participants could browse, compare, and connect with the right support. The two needed to work together, with the community driving traffic to the marketplace, and the marketplace giving providers a legitimate outlet that didn't compromise the community's integrity.
The challenge was speed. The community was already there. Participants were already asking. Every week without a marketplace was a week of unmet need. Kinora needed to launch quickly — and it needed to get it right for an audience that had often been let down by systems that didn't understand their lives.
Not a directory. A marketplace of real services, described by the providers who provide them.
Directories had existed for years — a name, a phone number, a paragraph of copy. No way to ask a question. No way to understand what a provider could actually do for you. For people navigating the NDIS, that gap is not a minor inconvenience. Finding the right support requires more information than a directory can hold.
Kinora's answer was service listings. Not business profiles. Not occupational titles. Actual services, described by the people who deliver them.
An occupational therapist is a job title. It tells you almost nothing. A service listing tells you that this particular OT works on motor skills, executive function, social skills, and education support — and does home visits in your area. That's the difference between a name in a list and a provider you can actually evaluate.
Providers who had always thought of themselves as offering one thing discovered they could describe five. When COVID hit, one cleaning provider updated their listings overnight — adding home organisation, decluttering, and COVID-specific cleaning to a previously single-line profile. Participants found them. New connections happened.
Search results are sorted by proximity. Someone in Sydney saw Sydney providers. Someone regional saw who actually serviced their area. For participants who face barriers to travel, this wasn't a nice-to-have — it was the difference between a useful result and an irrelevant one. And when participants wanted to know more, they could ask — through native chat, inside the platform, before any commitment or phone call.
Kinora chose a "buy" solution because their community couldn’t wait.
Building a marketplace from scratch was never realistic. Kinora needed a platform with strong out-of-the-box capability that could be shaped to a very specific community context — one where the audience was vulnerable, the trust bar was high, and a bad experience could do real harm.
Arcadier's managed services team was central to the decision. Kinora's technical team didn't need to become marketplace experts — they needed a partner who already was one, and who could get a fully customised platform live fast without cutting corners on the experience.
Lisa Wong, General Manager of Kinora - “Our technology team were keen to build from scratch, but as we mapped out the buying and selling flows, rules, checks, search and bookings - the complexity was overwhelming and the build would have extended well beyond 6mo. And we already had a full roadmap waiting.”
“Kinora didn’t need to become marketplace experts overnight. They needed a partner who already was one. We got them live fast - without compromising on what their community deserved,” explained Paul Cascun, Arcadier’s CTO.
The community forum built trust. The marketplace turned it into action.
The Kinora marketplace wasn't bolted onto the community as an afterthought. It was designed to sit alongside it — connected, but clearly separate. Participants could move between the community forum and the marketplace naturally, without the boundary feeling abrupt or the marketplace feeling like a sales environment.
Providers quickly learned how to operate in this dual environment. On the forum, they contributed genuinely their expertise — answering questions, sharing useful content, offering guidance on navigating the NDIS. That built their credibility with the community. On the marketplace, they had a professional profile and structured service listings where participants could explore what they offered and get in touch. The forum drove traffic. The marketplace converted it.
Find online. Connect in real life.
The Kinora marketplace covered a wide range of NDIS supports — support workers, therapy services, assistive technology, equipment, and more. Participants use it to discover what kinds of help are available, explore providers, and make contact.
From there, conversations happen through the platform's chat tools, and the actual service arrangement and transaction takes place in person — at the provider's premises or in the participant's home. The marketplace does the discovery and connection work. The relationship and the service happen in the real world.
This model fits how NDIS services actually work. Support isn't something you add to a cart and check out. It's something you choose carefully, often after a conversation, because it's going to affect how you live your life.
Data minimisation and privacy by design
Kinora's audience includes some of Australia's most vulnerable people. Privacy wasn't a compliance checkbox — it was a core design principle. The platform was built using SSO (single sign-on), which meant the marketplace held as little personal information about participants as possible. Identity was managed at the community platform level, not duplicated across the marketplace.
Less data held means less risk. For an audience that has good reason to be careful about who knows what about them, that design choice matters.
If your community trusts you, a marketplace is already half-built
Kinora's story is not a typical marketplace story. It started with a community that needed help, grew because it was genuinely useful, and added a marketplace because the community could benefit from one.
That sequence matters. The marketplace launched into an audience that already trusted the platform. Providers already knew the rules of engagement. Participants already knew what they were looking for. Speed to market was critical not because Kinora was racing a competitor — but because there was a real community with real needs waiting.
For any organisation that serves a specific community — whether that's a membership base, a patient group, or an industry network — the Kinora model is worth understanding. A marketplace built on top of genuine community trust is a very different thing to a marketplace built from scratch. Arcadier made it possible to launch that marketplace fast, and shape it to an audience that needed it to be done right.
Arcadier's CTO, Paul Cascun, described the project as one of the most satisfying his team had worked on — not just technically, but because of what it was for. The customisation work was driven by a genuine vision for inclusion and empowerment, and that raised the standard for everyone involved.
Want to know more about how Kinora did it? We can walk you through the implementation and whether your organisation could take a similar path. Get in touch.
