Enterprise Gateway Marketplaces Will Turn Large Organizations Inside-Out

Here’s a new marketplace category: Enterprise Gateway Marketplaces (EGMs).   There is a white space opportunity for Founders in EGMs that combines SaaS embedding defensibility with the network effects defensibility of a marketplace.

1. Executive sponsors: senior people with decision-making ability.2. Legal, compliance, procurement, and security: gatekeepers. You need to earn their trust before an enterprise will onboard to your platform.3. Employee users: Your product has to be user-friendly and provide a lot of value to end-user employees, especially as SaaS adoption increasi... See more

Now that we have the Internet and better ways of creating trust with people outside of an organization, it should be possible to make it faster/better/cheaper for nodes inside a corporation to link with outside nodes to complete certain tasks. 

How EGMs Will Change The Corporation Corporations have been the most efficient structure to get stuff done. They are large network structures that, like nearly all networks, minimize transaction costs and work on the law of least resistance.  Traditionally, the networks formed inside a corporation have been denser, faster, and more valuable th... See more

What is an  Enterprise Gateway Marketplace (EGM)? EGMs are a variant on the traditional 2-sided marketplace model. They are marketplaces tailored to help big enterprises (2,000+ employees) on the demand side coordinate with 1,000s of outside vendors on the supply side. To do this, EGMs have to solve unique workflow and compliance challenges on... See more

Four Attributes Of A Successful EGM 1. EGMs have a Gateway, a single point of access for many buyers. 2. Getting inside, get approved.3. Create trust in supply through data.4. Help vendors comply.

The positive thing is that once you solve the first and second sale for one large corporation, you often have enough demand to solve the chicken-or-egg problem and attract supply because the company should represent 100’s or 1,000’s or 10,000’s of buyers. This lets you methodically build toward critical mass and start benefiting from a network effe... See more

For EGMs, the biggest area of difficulty is that you have 3 different types of stakeholders on the demand side who dictate product adoption, and come with different types of needs, incentives, and acquisition strategies:

EGMs represent a new category of B2B SaaS.

EGMs are the approach we’ve seen that best unblocks the network pollution and makes it more efficient to go outside than rely on bringing things in-house.