
How Billion Dollar Marketplaces Are Built - domrdy
https://www.nfx.com/post/billion-dollar-marketplace-thumbtack
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russiansanders
A marketplace startup is a tough business, because you not only have attract
buyers and sellers, you need to police scammers.

Even Ebay/Amazon doesn't have a handle on this completely and they ARE billion
dollar marketplaces.

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nrp
It would be interesting to see examples of the alternatives. That is,
marketplaces that failed due to scammers, marketplaces that succeeded by
heavily curating to block scammers, and marketplaces that failed due to
excessive curation while trying to stop scammers.

I wonder if scamming is actually a symptom of a successful marketplace.
Scammers presumably have to think through their opportunity costs and would
want to focus on marketplaces with many buyers and sellers and high
transaction volume.

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everdev
> I wonder if scamming is actually a symptom of a successful marketplace.

For new marketplaces the risk and reward are pretty low. For mature
marketplaces the reward is much higher and the risks probably vary based on
your home country.

The ideal for a scammer is probably a site with good enough security to remove
most scammers but not good enough to remove you.

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nickjj
Can't this be summed up with making it super attractive for sellers (or the
content creators) early on, grow really fast and then completely screw your
content creators after you're somewhat established?

This is what it seems like for just about every marketplace. Marketplaces seem
like one of the most corrupt / shady / backstabby lines of businesses I've
ever been a part of. This is coming at it from a content creator on some video
course platforms in the past.

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cody3222
Can you give some examples? I feel like that's not the case: eBay, AirBnB, etc
are some of the iconic marketplaces and create massive income opportunities to
people who didn't this option before the platform existed.

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markdown
TripAdvisor. I deal with small business (owner-operator) resorts every day and
what they all seem to have in common is a hatred for TripAdvisor.

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echelon
What do they hate about it?

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cheriot
I've only been on the visitor side of things, but I've come to not trust
ratings on TripAdvisor. People come in with a set of expectations based more
on past experiences than their current destination. The reviews reflect this
(sometimes wild) mismatch and there's often nothing a hotelier/restaurateur
can do about it. The gap is biggest when there are cultural and economic gaps
between visitors and hosts.

It's not unique to TripAdvisor, but they're a 800lb gorilla in that market.

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AndrewKemendo
I'm increasingly convinced that building a marketplace or a social network is
the wrong way to think about it.

Rather it should be conceptualized as moving or consolidating an existing
market or network.

The best ones actually lower the friction for socially beneficial outcomes.

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josephjrobison
A good example of this that comes to mind on a very small scale is a marketing
slack community (TTT) that essentially took a loose network that already
existed and gave them a home.

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algo_trader
Has anyone interacted with NFX and Gigi Levy-Weiss? Especially with respect to
seed/pre-A investing?

I have seen plenty of NFX ads on reddit and twitter, but I guess it just a PR
push.

We are B2C, web-based, with some starting revenue, growing. But with out any
"stars/reputation" on the team. So that's our main weakness.

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retnuhllort
I cold emailed them once, hoping to pitch a business matching what I beloved
their thesis was. That didn't go anywhere and I never got to properly pitch to
them. We had minimal traction, no pedigree or track record of success.

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dinisp
Fabrice Grinda has some interesting content on YouTube and his website
regarding marketplace/platforms. Does anyone know of any Shopify equivalent
marketplace model that would enable one to build a niche version of Thumbtack?

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stanislavb
I'm positioning SaaSHub as a "software marketplace"; however, I've been told
it isn't a marketplace if there aren't financial transactions happening
through it.

What do you think, could there be a marketplace without facilitating direct
fin transactions?

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adventured
I think you make me ponder what's a reasonable limit to forcing commercial
spam into threads for self-promotion purposes.

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coder1001
Can you say online communities (e.g. Reddit) are like marketplaces?

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monkeydust
Would say no as their is no economic transfer on Reddit... Yet anyway.

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Scoundreller
But they sure do drive a lot of economic transfer one way or another.

You can post all of your retirement investments there and actually get pretty
good advice in a lot of parts.

That’s bad for a lot of « no-fee » financial planners.

Just for example.

