Building and Investing in Marketplaces

This is because marketplaces are not a race to growing GMV, they are a race to creating the most value for both the supply and demand side (liquidity). When you start in a small, focused market, it’s a lot easier to build liquidity and get to a meaningful percentage of that market, becoming the best place for both the supply and demand to go.

I believe that service marketplaces can only prevail if they fit into at least one of the following categories: repeated discovery, online-first marketplaces and SaaS-enabled marketplaces.

Marketplace: network where money/transactions flow between two or more sides with distinct groups of users on each side; successful marketplace where supply and demand are attracted to the same place