Welcome to Business Academy! It’s your go-to source for practical marketplace guides, success stories, and interviews with top platform economy experts.
Inspired by the success of online marketplaces like Airbnb, Etsy, or Fiverr? Want to know how to create a marketplace? You've come to the right place.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll go through everything you need to know about creating a marketplace. From designing and building a website to launching and growing your business, each article offers lots of practical advice with...
Compared to traditional e-commerce, most of a marketplace's unique challenges come from the marketplace having two sides to it: customers and providers.
When launching a marketplace, this means you need to solve the chicken-and-egg problem—how to get customers with little supply and how to get marketplace supply with only a few customers.
It can be argued, however, that the...
It is time to put your marketplace to its first true test: can you facilitate transactions between your customers and providers? Does your marketplace actually provide value for users?
As was stressed in the previous chapter on building your marketplace supply, you need to reach liquidity. Marketplace expert Simon Rothman puts it this way:
On the customer side, liquidity...
After you have seeded your marketplace with a stable initial user base, it's time to start thinking about growth. Here's how to find the right growth channel for your early-stage marketplace.
As Boris Wertz and Angela Tran Kingyens explain in their marketplace handbook, the key to growing a marketplace is to reach a virtuous cycle: high-quality providers bring in more customers, and...
Which marketplace metrics should you really track to know your marketplace is successful? One might think that growing your user base and having transactions occur is enough. However, things are quite a bit more nuanced than that.
Of course, you first need to define what success means to you. Do you want to build a global business, or are you satisfied with a local one? In any case, in this...
One of the biggest problems marketplace businesses need to tackle is fear. Whenever customers and providers engage in transactions, multiple sources of anxiety emerge. What if I make a payment, but the provider never delivers the product? What if I rent my surfboard to a stranger and they break it by accident? What if this website leaks my credit card details to hackers? If they are not...
As we have learned in the earlier chapters of the Practical guide for building a marketplace, the purpose of any marketplace is to facilitate transactions between users.
To do that, you need to have users who are engaged and committed to your platform. A popular way to achieve this is to turn your platform into something more than a marketplace: a community. This strategy has been used...
Once you have gone through the initial process of customer discovery, you should have a relatively good idea about what your users' real problems are and how to solve them.
In other words, you should be close to problem/solution fit. The next step is achieving product/market fit—finding a big enough market with a product that can satisfy that market.
To find...
People's attention spans have become shorter. With the rapid growth in the number of online services vying for people's attention, if you do not make an impression on your users within seconds, they will abandon your platform.
When building your marketplace MVP, it is important to consider what kind of a first impression it gives to new users and how it communicates your core value...
Your first job is to help customers find the product or service they're looking for. Of course, whatever they're looking for needs to exist on the site, meaning you need to have enough supply. However, even if the product or service is available, that does not guarantee that the customer will be able to find it. You need to make careful design decisions to make finding a specific product...
The marketplace transaction flow is complicated, but careful design can make it smooth and secure.
Many early-stage marketplace entrepreneurs pay a lot of attention to how many users sign up for their marketplace. This is a mistake.
User count is a so-called vanity metric—one that doesn't tell you if the marketplace is actually satisfying your users' needs. The purpose of any...
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