Thoughts on Building Technology Products and Businesses
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How do you feel about your company’s product vision, product strategy and product roadmap? These are high-leverage areas where many companies could sharpen their thinking and ways of working to become more effective. One of my favourite product management experts, Marty Cagan (author…
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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…
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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…
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How to Hire a CTO
How do you find and hire a CTO for your business? As a business owner you might be looking to find a CTO for a number of reasons: You have an established business and are looking for someone with the…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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What is the Average Churn Rate for a Subscription Box Business?
What churn rate can you expect for your subscription box business? What’s a good churn rate? What’s a bad churn rate? If you haven’t yet launched, what number should you put in your business plan? I wrote in a previous post about…
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How to Find a Good WordPress Developer on oDesk
You have a WordPress blog or website. You want some changes made to it, so you need to find someone who can help. But who? One effective way to find a WordPress developer is through a freelancing website like oDesk…
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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…
