Category: Marketplaces
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15 Marketplace Startups That Have Raised Over $50 Million
One of the interesting things about online marketplaces is their inherent network effects. They’re hard to get going (not least because of the chicken-and-egg problem) but — if successful — can become very valuable as it’s hard for other businesses to compete. As a result of this defensibility, online marketplaces have been popular with VCs.…
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How to Use Scarcity to Hack the Marketplace Chicken-and-Egg Problem
Solving the chicken-and-egg problem is a key one for any marketplace business. Here’s one hack that uses scarcity to help with solving it. What is the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem? When you’re starting a marketplace, you typically have no customers and no suppliers. With no customers, it’s hard to get suppliers on board. And, having no…
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How Hired.com Started a Fast-Growing Careers Marketplace
If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens of millions of dollars in annual sales and has raised over $70 million in funding.…
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7 Frameworks For Predicting Online Marketplace Success
What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental differences between the industries they chose to play in or their precise business models? What…
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How Thumbtack Built a Huge Local Services Marketplace
How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs. So how did Thumbtack get where they are? What tactics are behind their apparent success? The founder of…
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Skillshare: How to Build a Marketplace for Online Education
I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases in a marketplace’s journey: Phase 1: Seeding Where you “Roll up your sleeves up and…
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Getting to Critical Mass: 8 Ways to Kickstart a Marketplace Business
Are you thinking of setting up a two-sided marketplace business? It’s a hard thing to do, so you’re going to need all the help you can get. Why not learn from how other people have managed it successfully in the past? One challenge of creating this kind of marketplace is that you’re going to have to…
