
The Next 10 Years Will Be About “Market-Networks” - anacleto
https://www.nfx.com/post/10-years-about-market-networks
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sajacy
Look - the next 10 years is all about card-circulators. It's actually a
combination of two things: Cards, which present business metadata such as
contact info and personalized notes, and a circulator, which efficiently
organizes and presents the best contact for any particular job _. We 're
branding it Rolodex, but really, there is a whole industry ready to break the
mold of traditional B2B.

_ the users will need to adjust to new ways of organizing and sorting, but
some power users already have proven the new model.

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simonebrunozzi
The article is from 3 years ago.

It might be useful to know that since then, Honeybook raised a series C ($14M,
compared to a $22M B round) in June 2016 [0].

I see this as not necessarily a good sign of the health of the company (no
rounds for 2 years, and a smaller C round), but that's only a superficial
opinion of course.

This is not to discredit NFX's article or thesis, but just an FYI on the
specific company mentioned in the article.

[0]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/honeybook#section-
fu...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/honeybook#section-funding-
rounds)

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vm
Mods - please update title to show that this is from 2015.

Author says Honeybook Series B was "last month" \- it was Mar 2015
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/honeybook](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/honeybook)

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aetherson
Heh. So if we're 3 years into "10 years that are about Market-Networks," how's
that prediction aging?

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TrainedMonkey
How much are you willing to pay for that information?

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Envec83
It looks like HoneyBook pivoted from what is described in the article. Curious
huh?

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pietroglyph
I think there's a lot of potential in targeting markets where service
providers are not commodities, but the higher value and subjectivity of the
services they provide creates a greater challenge. I think getting clients and
service providers to trust these new market networks will be much more
difficult than it is to trust the Ubers/Lyfts because of the higher value. (I
think AirBnB is actually pretty close to a market-network.)

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d6e
Uber doesn't seem like a market since the "sellers" can't actually set the
price of their service.

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SamPatt
Instead of having a bunch of proprietary, centralized markets for each
service, why not create an open source, p2p protocol for trade and let anyone
offer anything they want?

Rhetorical question. It's called OpenBazaar and it's already in use around the
world. I work on it and I hope the original article is correct that there's
tremendous value in market networks.

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svp555
you sound like Dwight Schrute

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dfee
I’m trying to differentiate “market network” from “marketplace” and I’m not
clear that the distinction is adjacent but instead the latter is a type of the
former.

The question then becomes: if presenting on this to an investor, how would
another investor defend the difference as being more than just a repackaged
term?

~~~
ddevjani
Same here.

Seems like (someone correct me if I'm wrong) the "network" part is about how
users can have profiles and use these profiles as their portfolio. So a
network of people/ providers.

Also, the SaaS part seems just thrown in there, like ketchup on French food.

~~~
glenstein
>the "network" part is about how users can have profiles and use these
profiles as their portfolio.

I'm not necessarily sold on their premise, but the network part is about types
of fields where professionals are not interchangeable, so relationships,
vetting, recommendations, professional cooperation are important dynamics.

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Dowwie
This is also known among larger circles as an "economy".

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Dwolb
There’s a lot that’s missing on the thesis that needs to be explored.

1) How repeatable is a market-network that the workflow can be standardized?

2) For repeat providers, how can you provide more value to stay than to
disintermediate? Note by the nature of the examples these are all high value
situations.

3) An argument why these work flows and discovery tools are any better than
Google + email + a document suite

I like where it’s headed but we need to drill down a few more levels to
understand value and pain points.

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jamisteven
LMAO this is such a stretch, there will be no one stop "market-network",
markets will exist alongside markets like they always have, nothing new here
and why in the world would anyone invest in such a thing.

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rs86
Network effects... This is not an insight. This is basic economics.

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jeisc
who owns the data collected on the groups in the circle?

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corwinstephen
Yeahhhhhh I'm not so sure

